Making a Felt Hat — The Hat Block

I decided that I am going to make a hat.  Lots of great characters wear a cool hat–Indiana Jones comes to mind.  I’ve always liked hats in any case, and a nice one would be something that I could wear even if it isn’t part of a costume.

It turns out there are a few things needed to make a felt hat.  One of those things is a hat block.  A hat block is traditionally a wooden form, in the shape of the crown of the hat, over which the felt is stretched and shaped.  It turns out that buying one would cost more than I can afford to spend, so I had to come up with a way to make my own.  Luckily I found a tutorial online.

First things first, I needed to determine what size to make my hat block, so I put on a hat that fits me well and measured around my head where the hat sits.  Actually, I had my wife do the measuring, because it is pretty tough to get a good measurement on yourself.  I happen to have a rather large head with a circumference of 23-7/8 inches (this works out to roughly a 7-5/8 hat size.)   I needed to turn this measurement into an oval shape that would approximate the cross-sectional shape of my head.  Since I didn’t have access to a CAT scan to find out what shape my head was, I took the same hat I used to get my hat size and measured the width and length of the crown at the sweatband.  Being an engineer, I created an ellipse in a CAD program using these length and width measurements as the major and minor axis lengths.  I simply scaled this ellipse until I found the size that resulted in a circumference of 23-7/8 inches.  Then, to account for the thickness of a leather sweatband, I added 1/16th of an inch all around the ellipse.  The resulting oval was used as the cross sectional shape of my hat block.

Now that I had the basic shape needed, I picked up a sheet of 2″ thick Styrofoam from the local Micheal’s.  I transferred the ellipse shape I had developed onto the Styrofoam and cut it out using a band saw.   I needed the hat block to be 6 inches tall, so I stacked three layers of Styrofoam, gluing them together with white glue.  At this point I basically had an extruded ellipse with flat ends.

I want to make a hat with a basic “telescoped” crown, sort of like a pork pie hat.  To create this shape in the Styrofoam I simply attacked it with sandpaper.  An X-Acto knife was used to carve a shallow trench around the perimeter of the crown, which was then smoothed and rounded with more sandpaper.  Once I had the shape of the block the way I wanted, I applied a skim coat of wood filler to smooth out the surface and, hopefully, make the block more durable.  Two coatings of wood filler sanded smooth, and three coats of polyurethane later I have my completed hat block.