Just a quick post to say that I passed my exams! I’m now officially a milliner! Yipee! The exam results were released yesterday on the net, can’t wait to get the marks for each individual exam in the post! Juste un post vite fait pour dire que j’ai réussi mes exams! Je suis officiellement une [...]

At the moment I’m working on a hat for a friend of mine. She wanted a hat similar to the ‘Tutti Frutti’ hat (the first hat you can see in the gallery) just all in black. I’m currently making the  small cap base out of  a special straw. It is a artificial straw called ‘swiss [...]

I was looking at the Craftzine blog today and I came across pieces of artwork by Rosemarie Fiore. I love bright colors and was instantly attracted to her work. I was really surprised to learn that she used fireworks to create her splashes of color!! I wonder how she came up with the idea, it’s crazy!! Here’s [...]

The past week I had my hat exams, the most important part being three days (18 hours) spent making a hat from A to Z completely by hand.  Here are photos of the hat we had to make (scanned them of the exams papers), we had different colors though, blue hat with green ribbon.  It’s a [...]

My sister just brought to my attention a video on the  website of  ‘The Guardian’ newspaper. It’s about London hat creator Justin Smith. It is actually quite interesting to watch. Justin Smith talks about his work, his inspiration. He also gives a quick explination of how felt hats are made and the importance of handmade [...]

The school where I’ll be sitting my exams / L’école où je vais passer mes exams   The end of my course is here and tomorrow I’ll be starting the most important part of my exams!! Tomorrow, I start of with an art exam (it’s a quick two hour long test where we basically have to draw [...]

  I’m so happy! I was thinking about buying a new sewing machine and I finally bought it last weekend! Before I sewed on a rather crappy plastic Toyota and it was really starting to drive me mad. In the small workshop where I work we have a few really good Bernina sewing machines and [...]

This week I was in Paris for my last day of school, so I popped into Artnuptia. Artnuptia is a store that sells various hat supplies (feathers, flowers, stiffeners, sinamay, felt cones…..). They also have their own range of hats. I had already a clear idea of what I wanted to get so it didn’t take [...]