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

Nest

I thought this year I might sport an easter bonnet, so I made this one!

Balaclava

So, my little fingers have been busy for the past couple of weeks making this. It's a balaclava for Isobel and Cleo's autumn/winter collection 2010. All designs come from her ideas and research, and you can read about what she's been up to here!

Poppy Fascinator

This was originally meant to be a small every day fascinator. Some how it escalated into a big red poppy! I'll have to wait for a special occasion to bust out this one! This is a completely hand made and hand painted silk flower, with silk and velvet ribbon trims and olive green feathers.

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!

Handmade Heaven Fair - Dundee

For the last few days I have been willingly locked in my room making these. Mini fascinators made from fair trade Indian sari silk, hand dyed sinamay and, of course, feathers! They will be on sale at the 'Handmade Heaven' fair this Thursday 19th November 2009, in The Hannah Maclure Centre, Dundee, from 12pm - 6pm. There will be other folks selling there handmade wares, so remember to bring your money! Early Xmas shopping perhaps!

All designs copyright to Zoe Armstrong.