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step 11 - the big stitch

now we'll start pinning the liner and outer wool together for the final main stitch. this will be the trickiest part of all. i'll try to explain all the hardest parts and things to look out for. start pinning the liner to the outer, with the edges folded under, as shown below. note that you want the pins on the inside and pointing counter clockwise. here you see everything pinned in place as it should be. when you're doing this, be careful you don't make the liner too short or too tall in relation to the wool, causing an unevenness between the liner and the outer wool. also note that that pointy ends of the bill will go up inside the hat to a certain degree. the bill cardboard will actually be inside a little, and you'll be sewing through the cardboard in a couple places. here you'll see the tip of my thumb showing about how far inside the cardboard should be. and one more note, as you'll see here, when you pin the liner around the inside of the bill, you're NOT pinning it through the upper part of the hat, only through the wool on the bill. you can see the pins in the pic there illustrating this. you probably won't be able to get the pins through the cardboard, so just do like i did and put the pins as close to the cardboard as possible to hold it in the right place more or less, until we get to the actual sewing. also, you probably shouldn't bother trying the hat on at this point. the pins in the fabric will change the shape of it all, and you won't get a good idea of the size of the hat until it's actually sewn. also you'll stab yourself in the head with the pins.

the big stitch. i'd start at the rear, as seen in the top pic. put the stitch 1-2mm from the edge of the liner all the way around, ideally. then go all the way around, and you're done. ha ha, zing, that was easy wasn't it? no, so here are the things you need to look out for: at many points in this stitch, the sewing machine may, for various reasons, lose its traction on the fabric and fail to advance the thing properly. you'll have to help it out here, by pulling on the fabric from the rear. this works better than pushing from the front. when sewing over that thick fold in the front edge of the flaps, the thing might get bunched up or tangled or something. be careful here. the hardest part is the transition from the sides of the hat onto the bill. go extra slow here and make sure the needle doesnt wander off the edge or too far inward, and make sure that it's going through both the liner and the wool and stuff. also, remember that at these points on the side, you'll be stitching through the cardboard a little bit. if you're not, then you didn't align things right. see the middle pic for how it should look more or less on these parts. in fact, i pushed the envelope a lot more than i needed to on this one. you'll see that the stitch goes off the top front wool right at the edge of the bill. you could easily go a couple centimeters farther into the bill area than that before going off the top front wool, and it would be fine. this step is the hardest because, although you need to align the top front wool and the bill and stuff all properly, it's all on the bottom and you can't see it. you have to do it this way because if you turned it over, the liner would be invisible to you when sewing over the bill part, and you'd have no idea how close to the liner edge you were sewing, and if it's not within 1-2mm, it'll look totally wrong. when you move onto the bill, after a couple centimeters onto it, about when you get OFF the cardboard, you want to pull on the top front of the hat from the left side, to get the upper front wool of the hat out of the way. you don't want to stitch through that stuff, except on the far sides of the bill. invariably you'll mess up at some point on this stitch. don't worry about it, just grab your stitch ripper thing and pull the bad stitches out (you don't really need to pull ALL the stitches you just did out, only the part you screwed up) and go over it again. remember if you're starting a new stitch, hit the reverse lever at the beginning and end of it so you'll stitch back and forth a bit to make the thread tight and solid.

one more thing, you'll notice that around the rear of the hat, there are two visible stitches now. it might look wrong, but as far as i can tell, it's normal. the repro hat i copied from (an ATF hat, btw) in fact had three visible stitches here. not sure why, though. it looks like i did it damn near perfectly this time, much to my surprise. now you can try the thing on and see how it fits. of course if it doesn't fit, you'd have to redo about half of this whole tutorial. i need to work out a better way of adjusting the hat size during construction.

also, it's been 90% humidity the last week here, and in that time, my WH buckle that i just had hanging off a chair, has artificially aged itself. bet i could sell it for $400 on ebay now.

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