What is it even?

Hi there pals! How are things where you are? Rainy day here in PamKittyVille and I'm inside and cozy, doing a little of this and that.  Lately it seems busy, had a work day, a couple of fun social days and now a little bit of a sewing day.  

I don't know about you but I like to make things just for fun sometimes. This wackadoodle hat is one of those things.  There's really no good angle to show it and my favorite hat model isn't around so we just have to roll with what I have here. 

Anyway let me digress a little and say one of my favorite things about magazines back in the day was the Resources pages in the back, where you could find out where people bought things, do you remember that?  Long before the internet, you really had to be a private eye to find out something.  Now days you can image search  on Google!  Anyway I happened too see a wonderful shirt with rick rack and it led me to finding Bode Clothing and the original rick rack hat.  It's not on the site anymore but there are a lot of interesting (and expensive) clothes that use vintage pieces.  I made most of my clothes for a good part of my life and I always avoided a 'homemade' look if I could, but I also liked things that were kind of off or old fashioned, quirky.  Something about Bode appeals to me, the shapes of the clothes have a 50s and 60s feel, and I love a lot of the things that remind me of vintage California looks.  Also,  they approach quilted/pieced clothing from a totally different direction than we do as quilters and it's very interesting to me. 

But anyway the great thing about the internet is you can really zoom in and look at things up close and I could see how the hat was constructed.  Of course my version is insane compared to the original, it's made with canvas because I am not spending suede money on something like this.  I could not find smaller rick rack in a cream color and so what I had was just a smidge bigger but OMG it really makes it cartoonish.  Scale is everything, right? But you can look at the google search here and see it's not that far off. 

The best part about it was that it was fun to make.  If I came across some smaller rick rack in my travels (and by travels I mean hunting through my own stuff, I know there's some somewhere)I might give it another try.  I had some thread tension problems and Alex gave me a spool of her Quilter's Select thread to try and it fixed my problems.  There's some other cute ideas with rick rack I saw on Bode clothing,  like this shirt here, with daisies on it. I think I could take that idea and do something with it.  Will I, probably not but it's fun to think about.  I don't think that shirt is the best thing ever but I do think there's an idea there that would be fun to explore.  

Anyway that's the kind of thing I'm up to.  My friend Joyce and I are going to sew together soon and make a quilt from this book.  She's got a couple of quilts picked out from the book, so I need to get it together and select my fabrics. Do you have the book and have you made anything from it?  

Ok, that's it for me today.  Hope you're keeping warm (or cook depending on your hemisphere) and things are going ok ! xop