I didn’t want to write directly in the copybooks, so I have been scanning in the pages and printing them out to serve as guidelines placed under a sheet of paper.  I ordered a few Leonardt Principal EF nibs, which are supposed to duplicate the qualities of an antique nib, and am using Higgins Eternal ink on a layout bond paper.  The layout bond is thin enough that you can easily see the guidelines through it.

So far I have been working through copybook #1, which introduces all of the small letters–the miniscules that don’t have an ascender or descender.  I have completed the pages that introduce the i, u, n, m, w, and v.  It seems that the most difficult aspect is to maintain an even spacing between downstrokes, and an even shading of the letters.  The slant of the lettering, being 52 degrees, is a little awkward for me still, but I think I am starting to get the hang of it.  Sometimes I feel like a kid writing lines in First Grade.  Below is an excerpt of my attempts so far, so you can judge for yourself:

Sample of Spencerian Copybook Practice -- i's, u's, m's and x's

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.