renaissance flat cap

 So it's now been 1,5 weeks since my gastric bypass. Everything went fine. I could go home the day after and I could stop with painkillers after just a few days. I am very tired though, and I do fall asleep after every meal. I can definitely feel that my body is changing, and that together with the fact that being on sick leave means that I am on just 80% of my wages until I am back means that I have put a halt on new costume projects for myself, and from buying new supplies. I do have a costume project that I have started on and as soon as I feel that I can go back to the cosplay meetings, then I will continue with that, since it's size doesn't matter for it.

Anyway in the meantime my husband needs some early 16th century winter clothes and I started with making him a cap, out of fabric that  I had at home.

When you search for men's hats for the period the most common tutorial or pattern you come across is for what is called the Tudor flat cap.

This is an early form of the cap, in a Holbein portrait from 1541. Later on the brim of the cap would become stiffer and a bit smaller. Still I want my husband and I to go for a 1520's look, when the caps were floppier.

This is a portrait dated to around 1520, and here you can see a wider and softer hat, and there is no brim rather a piece of fabric that goes down a bit on the head. Since I am making a winter cap I wanted the fabric to go down over the ears for warmth.

the colour of the caps seems to 90% blac, but I only had this grey wool, or a very bright green to choose from. I used one of the tutorials for a Tudor flat cap that you can google, but I made it bigger. In the end the diameter is 38 cm and the inner diameter, that fits my husband's large head, is 20 cm. The brim was the same size as the crown of the hat, but that was too floppy and too long. I reduced the floppyness by adding two darts, just by the ear, and I cut down the length of it freehanded, until it fit my husband.

Like most of my husband's costumes this one is sewn on the machine, in total it took me less than 1 hour to get the cap together. 

I didn't have enough fabric to double the brim and it's unlined so it feels a bit naked as it is. Since this is going to be a winter cap I will go and see if I have some scraps of fur so that I can make a fur lining for the brim and add a lining to the crown as well.