Another Steampunk Hat Tutorial with a Mad Hatter theme!

Hello there

I had a rather exciting thing happen this week.  A lady called Liesl contacted me about buying one of my hats she had seen on Pinterest.  The only problem was that the one I had in storage must have landed under something heavy... which left me with the only other option which was to make her a bespoke hat!

I started by covering the hat with gel medium and adding the crunched tissue paper, both on top and underneath the hat

Once the hat is dry, I cut the excess paper out the hole with a blade.

While the hat was drying, I got out all my embellishments to see what I wanted to add to the hat.  The theme was Mad hatter steampunk style.  Liesl had sent me some photos of hats she liked and I took elements from each of them and combined them into one.

Below you can see the acrylic paint base going on to help create a faux leather look.

This is the base layer before I added anything.

Then I added some distress paints and sprayed them with water.

Followed by some Wendi Vecchi black Embossing paste through Tim's stencil in random places on the hat to mimic the paper she had seen on a hat.  It almost looks like velvet in real life.

When this was dry I added the rivets with Glossy Accents.

And went to town with some embellishments and die cuts as well as another pair of distressed giant swimming goggles....the shop where I purchase them a few at a time must think I am a swimming instructor or something... little do they know!

This is the finished hat from all angles:

The photos above have come out a lightish yellow, but in real life it looked more brown like the photo below where you can see the the time stuck on 6pm as it did in the story of Alice in Wonderland.

This is the chaos on my desk as I frantically created her hat in a mad two evenings after work!