Elegant hat made in green fur felt
A full description soon in the appropriate threads
More to come with some weird Borsalino fu Lazzaro, Barbisio and others
Thanks, Mm!
+1
)Hey all!
Last week, while doing a late evening perusal of Goodwill.com, I spotted a listing for a "Tiger Special dress hat". There were three low res pics of an old, rather thrashed-looking greyish-blackish hat. I usually will contact sellers about condition of leather and stitching, but this was almost halfway through one-day listing, so I just took a chance on a hat that needed love and dropped a 4 dollar opening bid.
It arrived Tuesday, and boy, did it need love! The sweatband, while present and in decent shape, was completely detached with a few twists of rotten thread hanging off. The 2 3/8" grosgrain ribbon and bow were rumpled. I took a couple of pics to try to reassemble it as close as I could, but the ribbon was about as fragile as tissue paper and fell apart as I removed it. The brim binding seems in good shape, but I'm not going to tug on it or anythinbg. Here's a few pics of the details with the hat apart.
Note the stamp on the back of the sweat for the patent-pending leather tratment process.
The factory tag, before manipulation of the felt made it crumble:
The bow...you can see a little of how beat the poor thing was.
The bow was nearly at the rear of the hat. There was no liner. The felt, while slightly mothed, is thin and light, very dense and in great condition.
After giving it a naptha bath I tried my best to re-sew the unreeded sweat the way it was originally stitched in, but after several attempts I discovered I have neither the eyesight nor the dexterity to sew those tiny stitches, so to preserve the leather (and my sanity) from further damage, I just fudged in the sweat the best I could to make it wearable. No pics of fudged in sweatband.
I replaced that WAR with a (1 1/8") mid-ribbon, mostly because it was what I had that looked best on it.
The details:
Crown: 6" open
Brim: 2 1/4"
Weight: 91 grams
I know I'm not very good at determining age of hats, but I'm going out on a limb here and guessing late 20's maybe early 30's. I, as always, welcome opinions more expert than mine.
Brilliant rescue, Moe! While looking at the "before" photos I kept thinking, "Look at that poor hat. All it really needs is some TLC." You provided that, and breathed new life into it as well. Seriously strong work!
