Heart Urchin Hat

This is my Heart Urchin Hat. It is knitted in 100% superfine 4 ply alpaca. It's a really light hat with an airy feel, due to the lace pattern. Being alpaca however, it is super snugly and warm, ahhhh alpaca!

The Urchin has glass seed beads knitted through it, to give it a bit of sparkle!  The Urchin also has super stretchy and loose ribbing. It won't lave a mark on your forehead - wonderful!

And, It's got hearts on it, so you get a little bit of love every time you wear it!

You can buy the pattern to knit one yourself here

Design copyright protected © Zoe Armstrong

Halloween Fascinator

Having somehow lost most of the essential components for my Halloween outfit this year, I was left with only one solution to the dress up dilemma. A plastic skull and 50p 'graveyard pack' from asda! Add some fake spiders with fake web and some trimmings with a glue gun, and this is what you get! Who's ready for the dead wedding then?!

Blocked cloche hat

I have always admired the 1920's Flappers. The original bad girls! So now a little history about the cloche and Flappers. Cloche is the french word for bell. Caroline Reboux was the milliner who first made cloche hats. Before the 1920's women had long hair, this was the respectful lady like thing to do. Cloche hats could not be worn with long hair. It's meant to be a close fitting hat, and this is not achievable with longer hair. So, the less hair you had, the closer to the head you could wear your cloche. Short hair in those times was also seen as a bold mark of Independence, and wearing a close fitting cloche could only signal that you had really short hair. Flappers were seen as a 'new breed' of women who openly flaunted doing everything a young lady of the time shouldn't - smoking, listening to jazz (how truly outrageous!), driving cars, wearing heavy make up, bobbing their hair and having casual sex!

So, a big thanks to all the girls who kept it real back in the 20's and helped the move towards free will and more Independence for women!

It made total sense to me then, that the first blocked hat I would make would be a cloche. You can never have too many cloche's, especially one that is ULTRAVIOLET! I wanted the brim upturned (a later variation of the cloche hat), as all my other cloches have downward bearing brims, and I put a little detail on it too. The inside is lined with turquoise satin and a petrol blue petersham head size.

I LOVE IT!