dicreasy2 | Mad as a hatter (Reply)

My big project this past week has been hats! It's only a fairly recent thing that we've stopped wearing hats as an everyday occurrence. Nowadays, they are seen only on special occasions, such as at weddings, or Royal Ascot, but up until after the Second World War, everyone wore a hat when they left the house. In fact the older generation (men especially) still wear hats. My Grandad always wore a cloth cap when he went out. Anyway the point is that all of my sims should wear hats when they're outdoors, but that there is a woeful lack of them, especially for my menfolk. Up until this week I've only had two hats I've really used for my blokes, the base game top hat, and a bowler from Carnaby sims. The bowler was only for teens, adults and elders, but a few months ago, I enabled it for young adults, and made several recolours using different hat colours I've found at AAS and

xgoat's LJ. I also planned to pooklet the base game fedora, since, I can also get away with using that, but even then, that mean I had only three styles of hat to use. I want the new neighbourhood to be as accurate to the time period and country as possible, and having so few hats wasn't what I wanted, so I made some more. Four styles of men's hat and one lady's.

A high round top derby. This is a hat that looks slightly ridiculous because of the proportions, but was actually very popular in Victorian England.

I also find it interesting that I've only come across it called a derby, and never a bowler.

I've been calling this one Watson's hat, because I was completely inspired to make this by Jude Law's Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes movie. As soon as I saw him in his hat, I wanted that hat in my game. He actually wears it at a tilt, and I might make a tilted version at some point.

John Bull topper, also know as a short top hat. I'm very pleased with this one and think it'll be nice to have a variety for my top hats. I'm also thinking of using the texture on the hat to recolour the tall base game top hat too.

Boater! (Hee, Bertie in a boater. I amuse myself far too easily). I admit, that this was mainly made for my tour guides and the natives of Simmouth. You might remember that I posted a picture of a default I'd made for my male tropical tour guides a few months ago:

Well, I wasn't a hundred percent happy with the mesh the texture was on, so I decided to make a proper boater for it. I am very happy with it. This is the only hat without a teen age at the moment, but I would like to make one in the future. I just need to have a poke about and find a suitable teen mesh to clone.

The last hat I made was this lady's riding hat. You can't see it very well in the above picture, but there is a swath of net veil round the band, that gathers at the bow at the back to fall behind it.

I spent hours getting that to look just right, and actually it was the most time consuming part of the project, since the hat itself is the John Bull topper resized and tilted. I'm unbelieveably pleased with it (hense why I'm pointing it out), but now I want a proper, authentic riding habit to go with it. I do have a riding habit, but it's not quite right. I want one of the heavily tailored, military style ones that became popular from the 1870s onwards.

My next job is to pooklet the base game fedora, then I want to see if the idea I had for the celebration stuff pack updo, without the veil looks better than I remember it doing. Once that's done, I can get cracking on making my townies and doing the bit of building I've still got to do.

Progress is awesome, and I'm glad I'm making it.

EDIT: I'm currently without internet at home, and will respond to the rest of the comments, either when it's back up, or in my lunch break at work.