Straw Crowns

I couldn't make it to Harvest Home this year, but did finish the new crowns for the harvest king and queen.

The pictures were a bit rushed, I'm afraid.

This time, I plaited both crowns in whole-straw (7-strand Dunstable to be precise) rather than split for a more substantial crown, and worked the decorative elements directly into the plait itself. I also tweaked the fit, and sewed the bands into the crown shape, with the ends plaited in, rather than trying to knot the ends. The effect is a stronger and more substantial than my first attempts, though still light.

The crown on the left has spreuer leaves, and a quilled rosette at the center front, covering a sewn join in the band. The crown on the right has spreuer wheat sheaves in both positions. 

While I haven't found any original straw crowns or depictions of harvest kings/queens, the materials are all appropriate to the mid-19th century, being wheat straw and a bit of cotton thread. The decorative motifs are from Swiss Straw Work: Techniques of a Fashion Industry by Veronica Main, and do show up in period hat-ornaments, though the manner they are used here if my own invention.

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

Straw Ornaments, c.1850-1870

"Many [straw bonnets] are trimmed entirely with a fancy ornament in straw. A row of straw rosettes ornaments the front and a thick cord with tassels à l'Imperatrice is twisted round the crown."

    --Frank Leslie's 1859

 

So, I finally started playing around with the rest of my straw-work tools. Which may have lead to trying to copy some of the mid-19th century straw hat ornaments in the VAM. As one does.

Not a bad, until I compare them with the originals...

It's been an educational first attempt. Observations in no particular order:

• Identifying the different techniques on the originals was much easier than I feared.
• The actual tools and techniques are pretty straightforward. Most of the beauty and interest comes from combining many techniques to make intricate, precise decorations.
• Wrapped beads are THE WORST. It's exactly like making thread-covered buttons with no control over the tension, and despite being straightforward and technically easy, I hate it.
• I need a lot more practice on most of these techniques to get the repetition right.
• Downloading the pictures allows for much closer views than the "zoom in" function in the web browser.
• Relatedly, I'm pretty sure the straw-thread "petals" should actually be a three-end ring plait. Also smaller, and seven in number instead of six. I seriously counted them three times.
• Also the watch-spring rosette should have small flower-shaped straw sequins with beads at the center, not quilled rolls.
• Most of my favorite designs include at least some die-cut straws, nearly all of them too fiddly to cut out by hand. No idea where to source a 1/4" flower-shaped punch, so it'll be an adventure.
• I also need to source a straw spinner or figure out how to hack my spindles for straw thread. The hand-twisted versions are just too slow and rough, and I'm not sure how long my source for pre-made will be available. I really like using it, so I need a reliable source for it, especially if I want to start trying the fun lace-work "fancy braids" for hatbands and trims.

And of course, I couldn't resist trying my hand at the best part of everyone's favorite bonnet veil: 

Prototype bees!

The bees on the VAM veil are two toned: they have a black-and-yellow striped body, with yellow die-cut straw wings, black straw thread outlines, and black glass bead eyes (with a clear bead between). The yellow stripes on the body appear to be smooth and whole, over a more complicated black underlayer. Some of them appear to have black antenna and/or legs, but that might just be the net design fooling my eye. There are also multiple un-dyed straw bees in the technique book I'm using (Swiss Straw Work by Veronica Main), which are implied to be examples in a Swiss museum. They aren't broken down as a project, or even given close-up images, but they follow the VAM bees' two-layer wings and bead eyes. The bodies on these bees are also more clearly textured as knotted straw thread. 

I experimented with two body techniques: a straw thread figure-8 (left and center) and thread wrapped around a whole straw (right). I'm not entirely satisfied with either: the figure-8 is more fun, but it's a little too flat, while the wrapped straw is just a bit too narrow (and also was deceptively difficult to neaten up). I dyed the colorful bee with turmeric (a period receipt) and with RIT dye (not period, because period black dyes are on a whole other level). I have a lot of dyed straw left over, so I plan to keep tweaking the construction until I get a design I like. 

These will probably find their way into my straw-plaiting program on Saturday (time permitting), so please drop in with any questions or comments.

Plaited Straw Hat

Hat of indeterminate vintage

It's a completely hand-plaited, hand-sewn hat. Shaped free-hand. The plait is 7-strand "Dunstable" (except not really, because it's quarter-split rye instead of whole straws, but I used the "over 1, under 2" plait). There's about 12 yards of plait in in, and on the order of 40-50 hours work. 

The year is a bit open-ended. I had intended it to have a very shallow crown, similar to one I saw in a Bruegel painting (almost flat, but very slightly convex--suffice to say, that attempt got rapidly out of hand). And while most of my sources do point to 16th century for early examples of plaited straw hats in Europe, they seem to have picked up more in England in the 17th century. However, the splits are a more recent innovation, supposedly dating to the early 18th century, but rapidly multiplying in form and use from the early 19th.  I could use it for working-class, rural 19th century summer-wear, though what little documentation I've found for such humble items suggests a flatter shape would be more likely.

I'll be talking about this project (and a ton of research done along the way), this Saturday at the Fort Nisqually virtual program.

Straw Plaiting Kit

Tools!

I'm rather pleased with my new straw-plaiting equipment. The metal (and wood) quarter-splitters were made by one of the Fort's blacksmith. I sewed the tool roll; the design is my own, inspired by various sewing rolls (and toiletry rolls, and work pockets, and rolled cases for surgical instruments). I'm actually proudest of the wooden spool thing, since I sawed it to size, and rounded the corners with a draw-knife--it's quite fun, and using the shave-horse looks cool when one is in skirts.

First Foray into Straw Plaiting

Working on some more large projects, which will hopefully be post-worthy in the next few weeks.  In the meantime, here's my first attempt at straw plaiting.

It's just a basic 3-strand, using 1/2 split straw (the red things are straw splitters: 2, 3, 4, and 6-way). I've already learned a lot about working the straw wet and folding--rather than bending--it.  The next objective is to split it finer while keeping the pieces even; after that, I hope to make the edges smoother and the ends neater when I work in a new length of straw.  After that, it's fancier braids, and eventually producing something like this:

Straw plait for bonnets, made in Hawaii, 1858.
Currently in the Smithsonian.
It's 1cm wide, and appears to be a 6-strand plait.