Like all vintage lovers and sewers, I was excited to find vintage Vogue hat patterns 7325 and 7464. I was very much looking forward to getting hats out of both of them.
Lets look at 7464 first shall we?
A number of years ago I made the green hat, view B, which I wore once and then donated to the op shop. I made it from felt, and from the get go it just wasn’t right. I have worn vintage hats for years but the main thing about buying a hat is that you get to try it on and see if it suits you. The problem with making a hat from a pattern, and an unusual hat, is that you don’t really understand how it will turn out.
I like hats, unusual hats, but this one was just naff to wear. The pattern steps were unfinished. Like, literally, they don’t give the final steps to finish the hat. You have to work it out for yourself. There are other reviews of this pattern online and everyone suffered from the same disappointment and frustration.
Look, I’m rather an experienced sewer. My grandmother was a tailor (she did in fact sew my new blue jeans!) – and got me into sewing up stuff very early. I also joined the SCA at uni and had to make my own costumes. I’ve draped and cut and sewed entire Tudor outfits, from corsetry to shoes, I’ve made and worn Elizabethan ruffs and jackets, I’ve made sideless surcoats, belts, bags, and rather a lot of dresses and a number of lined jackets, I’ve made hennins, french hoods, flatcaps, all from either pictures or patterns. I’ve dressed as Gredo, the Goblin King, an Elf queen, and a Klingon. These days you’d call it cosplay, back then it was called costuming or garb.
I also, for a living, have written detailed technical instructions. I’ve written done test cases/instructions with hours of elaborate pre-requisite data set-up, and then elaborate steps and troubleshooting guides. I know how to write a set of instructions for people to follow. I’m not a novice. But this pattern instructions were baffling and enraging and, worse, incomplete.
There are a lot of patterns out there that are difficult to follow. One of the thirties style blouses I made once was utterly bewildering and skipped steps and I got that done – eventually. But that was a smaller company and there is an error for margin in someone doing patterns out of their lounge room. There is no excuse for Vogue, a large pattern house, to be so downright sloppy. It smacks of “Like I give a fuck, you bought the pattern, I got your money, I win.”
Years passed, and I decided to do some of the other views. I had in fact forgotten the frustration of B hat until I read other’s reviews on line recently. I had some brown corduroy remnant, and decided to do hat D, which seemed quite simple, and it was, except that there was a bit about elastic that made very little sense in light of the pictures and placement. Again, there seems to have been a lack of review of the instructions to see if someone who didn’t write them, could follow it. I left out the elastic frankly because I honestly didn’t get where it was supposed to go – and made the hat and tried it on and i looked like a total moron. You don’t realise how BIG the hat is till it’s on you BEING BIG. Yes, I know it’s big on the pattern but the styling seems right for the pattern and I’m going to have to wear this thing out in public and it looked foolish.
I solved this by runching and folding sewing down a bit of it and popped a little button and a bow on it. It will now be wearable and I quite like it.
It didn’t come with lining instructions, I put my own lining in. Unlined hats – WHY? Vogue should be high-end patterns and yet, again, total sloppiness there.
And now we get to hat view C which looks great on the pack and I was looking forward to – and AGAIN does not have adequate instructions and was a lesson in frustration and fury.
One of the issues is that there are no views of the back of the hat pictured in the instructions, INCLUDING the inadequate bit that supposedly tells you how to finish the hat. So mine is done wrong. I have found other reviews on line and it seems I put the bow in the wrong spot – on the upper brim not the lower brim that was flipped up. But to be fair, there is literally nothing in the instructions to actually tell you clearly what to do and where to put it. It’s frustrating and not good enough.
There is nothing in the instructions to tell you to sew down the runched layer, either. You have to work that out for yourself. Or how to set the bow so it doesn’t look stupid. I experimented but the ‘flip the back up’ (not that clear) instruction is not until after the bow instruction and so it’s not obvious that the final shape is going to look like this.
The hat is oddly perched and looks like a bonnet. You get trailing ribbons that, again, made no sense to me in the instructions as to what to do with them or how to place them or how they should work – It will sit ok when I do rolls in my hair and pin them in, but ARGH!
There was no lining on this hat from the pattern, which would leave you with a view of buckram, which is to my way of thinking, utter bullshit.
Shame Vogue Vintage 7464, shame!!!! Not making any more of your stupid hats from this pattern.
