#reverse engineer

"An American artist's (mistaken) drawing of how the Digesting Duck may have worked"

I came across images from this out of print Vogue sewing pattern (V8175) for wool felt hats, and View F does things to me:

Sadly I didn't have the like $60 for purchasing an out-of-print sewing pattern (and honestly, there are others out there who'd probably make better use of the full pattern--I just want views E and F). Thank fuck for bloggers though!

Kelly (Seam Racer) made this blog post in 2015 and included a shot of the pattern pieces:

as well as a brief description of the construction:

With a pattern this easy and simple, at first I was doubtful as to how it would work out. As you can see above, it takes only three simple, unusual shaped pieces to become something amazing in no time at all! The rectangle sort of piece with the notch in it is the crown, and the crescent is the brim, and the tiny band is the loop for my feather. The brim piece gets a dart along its length (if you look closely you can see it marked on the felt). Then you sew together the long ends on each side of the square notch. Next, that notch turns into the crown’s asymmetric side pleat/indentation by opening it up a different way and sewing it together. That’s it! It magically turns into the crown as you see it on me and the pattern envelope cover. For the brim, the slanted ends get folded under before it is attached to the crown. This part was tricky, but still much easier than expected with the brim and crown matching up and fitting perfectly.

I was immensely tickled by this construction, and set about trying to reverse-engineer myself a hat like this.

I traced the photo off my screen and then tried to adjust for camera angle and symmetry. I cut this from a small piece of craft felt to see how to sew it together:

I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the back of the brim, but in the original pattern, it's left open (the two ends are simply folded out of the way).

I decided more research was required, and found this vintage pattern, digitised by Etsy seller APatternPeddler:

View 2 appears to have a very similar construction to the Vogue pattern, so I purchased it--largely for its instructions.

The crown has darts, which I found more cumbersome than anything. The hand-traced pattern pieces also didn't match each other well when sewing the brim. And the hat produced by the pattern was notably smaller than my 22" head (despite the pattern being drafted for a 22" head).

And perhaps I was also overzealous in making this first go in my nice materials:

But these instructions validated my ideas about the Vogue hats' construction at least:

It was a low-risk purchase and I gained the spite confidence to make changes to my traced Vogue pattern pieces.

I sewed my copycat-Vogue mockups out of cheap thrifted felt, sometimes switching to nicer fabrics when I was confident the changes were final (spoiler alert: it's still not there yet).

Here's my version 4 in felt:

This muslin was just to get the size and shape, so the brim is one layer, and there's no lining.

Version 5:

I used a thrifted coat fabric for the main, and black canvas for the underside of the brim. The crown is unlined, but I used black fusible interfacing in an attempt to get more structure (but it wasn't thick enough). I was still having difficulty constructing the back fo the crown, but was feeling confident.

Version 6 in felt:

I'm pleased with the shape and construction of this mockup, and I've started construction in nicer materials. Hopefully that will go well and I'll write about it soon!

In the meantime here's me wearing either version 4 or 6:

I cannot list out every single journalistic or oped trash but just to rant on this one article about how Russians might be able to reverse engineer storm shadow, it’s just pure scum writing.

It ain’t news that anyone can reverse engineer or copy any military secrets if enough time elapsed. That’s how the fuck wmd proliferated. That’s how stealth technologies are not exclusively American.