La Couture ou la Mort: Hubble bubble toil and trouble

Cheesy title aside I'm pretty excited about this post.
To celebrate her birthday my friend Hannah held a Harry Potter themed dinner party. See, this is what happens when the Harry Potter generation grows up, we have dinner parties like fancy adults except we get to drink pumpkin juice and eat awesome Wizarding World inspired food whilst dressed like the fabulous witches and wizards we still wish we could be.

I got incredibly excited about this (as is my way) and before my family and I left for Wales in July I grabbed my buckram, millinery wire and some silk and set to work making a suitable hat.
My plan costume wise was to 'look as if I could blend seamlessly into the background of a Diagon Alley scene'.

My assembled materials

The first thing I did to create my hat was draft a pattern out of cartridge paper.

I then transferred the shapes to my buckram and cut out the fabric pieces using the same pattern. I added seam allowance to all the edges on the cloth pieces but only to the inside of the brim on the buckram pieces.

The silk I had decided to use was some that I purchased for crazy cheap and a warehouse clearance earlier in the year. It really deserves it's own post but essentially I got silks worth over £50 a metre for roughly £1 a metre and I'm still reeling from the experience.

Here you can see the lining being glued on, it's just a thin later of cotton to help prevent the buckram pattern showing through the thin silk. Just before I did this I whip stitched millinery wire around the edge of the brim.
I decided to glue my fabric on this time instead of sewing everything by hand just to save on time, I used copydex and it worked fine. If you can deal with the smell (which I'm fine with after using ridiculous amount of liquid latex for my final major project at college) and you're using a lining or middle layer (to stop it running through to the top fabric) you'll be golden.

More gluing. and a peek at the inside of the cone.

Sewing up the cone and the finished seam. I think I used some kind of bastardised version of a slip stitch to do this but really it was all about shoving the needle through in the most subtle way possible and hoping.
At this point the shape was a little distorted but it evened out once I got it sewn onto the brim.

The cone sewn onto the brim and a look at how exactly that's done. The seam allowance becomes those tabs and then I stitched through them to attach the pieces to each other.

I sewed the silk onto the underside of the brim with a tiny slip stitch, the fabric was pulled taught when I sewed the head ribbon in, which is what I did next. It would seem that I then completely forgot to take any photographs. I used the same blue petersham that I bought for my regency bonnet and also lined it with the same blue faux silk, although that came after I'd decorated the outside.

I made a hatband from brown velvet, it's not my neatest work but it's mostly covered up anyway so I'm not to bothered. The buckle was a miraculous find in my one of my local charity shops, isn't it completely and utterly perfect?

I then decorated it with some paper flowers, three giant berries and some of the leftover (read: the raggedy ones) pheasant feathers that didn't make it onto my bonnet.

I couldn't get hold of a hat pin in time so I tacked the curved side to the cone with a couple of stitches that disappeared into the join between the fabric on the top of the brim and the fabric on the underside.

Here you can see the petersham and the lining. You can also see the hairslides that I sewed in to help keep it balanced on my head. I had an awful time trying to keep it on but eventually managed something that sort of worked and although it was a little precarious it lasted until I took that hat off at around 11:30pm.

Below are some very bad, very dark Iphone pictures from the dinner.