Late last night as I finished sewing the orange ribbon roses for this hat, I had one of those moments of horrible realization. My little 1860s American girl doll hat, intended to be all Halloween-y and macabre-like for my Halloween-y 1860s doll ensemble, had turned into a 1980s wedding headband.
A wedding headband from 1986. Out of a special wedding double-episode of a daytime soap opera, where the groom wears a dove-gray tuxedo with a pink cummerbund, and the entire bridal party is high on hairspray and coughs up opalescent glitter through the ceremony.
This hat is the perfect accompaniment to the sort of tulle-and-sequin explosion that they used to design specifically for later display in thrift store windows.
You know exactly what I’m talking about – swags of stretch velvet and brassy plastic pearls, white illusion netting and monstrously puffed shoulders, with a matching beaded tiara sagging dismally from the neck of the coat hanger, and the whole ensemble getting dustier and dustier, and sadder and sadder every year, as the swags of spiky plastic lace turn yellow in the sunlight and droop to sweep the dust away from the racks of clip-on earrings that are also, surprisingly, there, because someone’s boss at some time decided that they would “just MAKE the window display, don’t you think?”
I’m occasionally reasonably good at making a tasteful 1860s American Girl doll hat. I’ve made several. But this whole thing is just cracktastic. And possibly… in a really good way. And so it shall be – for a very short time, this little hat will be known as the Hat of Inadvertently Cracktastic 80s wedding fabulousness. But the orange ribbon hat-band and the orange gauze streamers and the beaded wire sprays and the ostrich feather- they’ve all got to go. I’ll might keep a rose or two, and and the feather spear, but I need to go out and buy some black ribbons. And a spider. Possibly a mouse skull, what do you think?