Dragonfly life

Catharina Carlsson

Sweden

• HATalk Issue 132: Meet the winners – 2016 HATalk Competition

My inspiration is from one of my own hats in number 132. It might be lame to choose a hat that you made yourself for inspiration in this contest but it was fun to take that design for an extra spin and see what I could make out of it without copying myself. I have kept the basic shape of the hat but placed it more on the forehead. I wanted to test out a roll of straw fabric that has been unused in my stash for some time and it was fun to experiment with it. I have also a bug in about the same size as the ones in the original piece but I have used real bug wings this time. And they do say that ”go big or go home” so I topped this piece off with an enormous dragonfly that i made. This is the all-grown-up-piece compared to my inspiration hat. The colour theme is another too, basically because at the moment I am working on other hats with black as the base color and with an accent color, in this case blue.

• Straw fabric
• Millinery wire
• Buckram
• Silk fabric
• Petersham ribbon
• Sequins
• Thread
• Comb
• Organza
• Solidot
• Furfelt
• Pearls
• Genuine bug wings
• Acrylic paint
• Epoxy Glue

• Handshaping the fabric straw from a bias strip.
• Blocking the buckram base.
• Making the laser cutting file in Adobe Illustrator.
• Lasercutting of the wings.
• Making and decorating a ball out of Petersham ribbon.
• Building the bugs from scratch in furfelt and millinery wire.
• Decorated the dragonfly body with sequins and beads by hand.