So wtf is the capalog??
Basically a brand dedicated to the craft of cap making. Minimal style caps for sale in sustainable fabrics and made in small weekly batches.
So I'm a milliner, (hatmaker) and pattern-cutting fabric for headwear is a pretty basic part of millinery. One of the first ways I learnt how to make hats, (way back in a theatrical millinery class in 2006) was looking at the hats that we wanted to make from a 2D angle, in order to make the final shape out of flat fabrics. Sounds more complicated than it actually is! And well the possibilities are endless.
Theatrical millinery means lots of costume & period hats from different time periods, BUT It also means thinking outside the box & NO one production is the same. This means weird & wonderful materials and generally creating a lot of new shapes. So you have to start pooling everything you've learnt so far in order to make the latest mad design for a production.
Also my millinery experience has also involved bridal veils surreally, now I know none of this sounds related to caps.. But for SO many of these types of headwear it has been the pattern cutting side that I learnt from & was curious about. Like doing an apple green velvet beret for a costume designer for a production at the welsh national opera or figuring out the shape of a veil for a customer who found a pic on pinterest and wanted that EXACT drape. It all comes from the original flat shape of the fabric.
For veils there's a lot of ovals involved and for the beret it was a circle on the top, with an extra bias strip to create the curved shape & height that the designer wanted... but that could also hide the seams in the velvet that she had picked out. In APPLE bloody green. i.e. you can see the seams.. crap. (we don't wanna see the seams, but there needs to be seams & it needs to be the velvet..)
So why caps?? Well caps are practical and comforting. The style list is endless too, fisher, baker boy, cloche cap, trapper, deerstalker and ones that don't even have established names.
Caps are just one of the few styles of headwear that can utilise earthy practical fabrics, but also you can use funkier wools and houndstooths. You can have soo much fun with caps and fabrics. And well figuring out the jigsaw of the pattern cutting is sort of addictive once you start figuring out the elements.
So yeah wtf is the capalog? It's basically my little outlet for patterning caps. All the caps are designed by me and the pattern drafting is done by hand from scratch. They are all made to multiple headsizes, so any cap can be made to your headsize, from kids right up to super large can never find it in the shops size. The fabrics are also specifically chosen to either be sustainable, quirky or practical (hopefully all of these).
All the caps are only made in small batches, cos well lives too short. They are all stitched on a wee bernina sewing machine and some elements are stitched by hand too. The cut off for each batch is every wed at 12pm.
The styles currently available for sale are all listed in the Cap Index and more styles in the catalog are def coming.