Straw Hat, Rustic Plait

I really needed a lightweight sunshade for Faire, and decided to sew another straw hat. The inspiration for this piece was a particular painting (more on that anon), in which a peasant woman in a market scene wears a wide-brimmed straw hat with no appreciable crown. The hat instead looks like a very shallow basket turned upside down.

 

Top view of the hat.

The hat I made is fully hand-sewn from 20 yards of (commercially-plaited) straw in a 4-strand whole-straw rustic plait. It was sewn freehand, though I blocked the crown flat repeatedly during the early stages of sewing. The sewing process took about 34 event-hours, during which this hat was my main project.

I had intended to block the whole hat over a large, shallow dough bowl of the desired shape, but found that the plait tended to curve downwards naturally as I sewed it. In fact, all of the shaping after the first seven rounds (which were blocked flat until the hat got bigger than a dinner plate) came from the natural curvature of the straw as I tried to sew it as flat as possible. I'm tempted to use it for rougher working impressions at the Fort, since I can document the idea of a flat, home-made, straw hat as a harvest-time sunshade in the 1850s--and 'make a flat hat without a block' is precisely what I was doing here.

 

 

Side view showing the epic shape.

Despite the shape, I found that the straw tends to cling to my hair/coif, and will generally stay put. It's not up to really brisk walks, wind gusts, or bending over to drive tent stakes, but I managed to wear it a whole weekend without any fasteners. I'm tempted to add some woven tapes to the underside (probably to tie under my hair), but the hat does work as is. The whole-straw is heaver than the last hat I made, but lighter than any other reproduction hats I've handled (or any material).

I do not have documentation for the origins of rustic plait. My spreadsheet of Victorian sources does not include any citations which mention rustic as being new or name a date of origin; these same sources claim that whole-straw plaits originated in the 16th century, while split and double plaits were more modern inventions.

*I had remembered this painting as a Bruegel, though I can't find the exact image online, and will need to borrow the book I saw it in to confirm. In my search, I did come across other depictions of straw hats which aren't wholly dissimilar.

Sloping hats from Bruegel's Charitas (1559)

Most of Bruegel's peasants, however, favor straw hats like those above, almost conical except for a small, flat crown. The Corn Harvest shows two women wearing wider, flatter versions of the conical hat, one being distinctly straw-colored and the other black.

Wide hats in Bruegel's The Corn Harvest (1565)

Aertsen's paintings, in contrast, show deeper crowns on the wide-brim straw hats worn by many of the women:

The Vegetable Seller (1567) by Pieter Aertsen