Male Speaker: Oh! Common mould, common Oh! Its alive, its alive.
Female Speaker: What are you doing?
Male Speaker: Oh! Four member concrete tsunami as how to make a floor hat out of filth and I was told that we need mold for it. So I am just going to add this little blue baby in here.
Female Speaker: I think they were talking about a different kind of mold.
Male Speaker: Then what do we suppose to do with this guy? Are you kidding me I blew off a loaf of bread for this gig.
Female Speaker: Yeah let's leave the hot molds Victor Osborne for now on, shall we?
Victor Osborne: Hey! Everybody my name is Victor Osborne and you are joining me here at my in my shop here in Lindberg, Brooklyn. I have been making hats in New York for about 4 or 5 years. I like being called a Millionaire because I think its some what of a rare term used these days and there is too many of us around. I am going to show you how to take a hat that you love. Something you can find at the shop somebody of you can go in vintage stores. I going to teach you how to replicate that shape and make a mold out of it, I am going to show you how to make a professional block.
This is the key stone for all Millionaires, it's the block you will have and you can use over and over and over again.
So the first thing that you are going to want to do to get your custom hat is go down to your local vintage shop and pick out a basic straw or felt form of a hat shape that you really like that you can work with. I found this kind of awesome hat that I really like the crown shape of and I want to make a cocktail hat very similar to this. You are going to take this and you are going to cover it in a spray sizing. You can get it at art stores like a fixative or something like this, it's going to keep the shape really hard and then that's going to make it in ever stiffer shape and it will be easy to work with.
Air it out, let it dry give it a few minutes and we will come back to it.
So after you have sprayed the fixative on it and its dried it's really more like a shell. What you are going to do now is if you found something that has a trim around it or have like a decorative kind of aspect you have to cut off anything that's going to get in the way of putting the foam inside the hat to make the block. Here is your base form which we are going to use now to create the block.
The next step is you are going to go to your kitchen and you are going to see you have as far as a PAM spray or a cooking spray something like this. We are going to use this to cover the inside of the hat and give it a nice slippery coat so it can be really easy to work with and it's not going to cause any trouble taking it off the block.
The next step that you are going to want to do after you have primed your original hat, you are going to go under the hardware store and you are going to pick up your expandable foam. A compressed foam that you can just put on the inside of the hat block itself and it will slowly expand and it's going to take on the same shape as the crown of this hat, don't fill it up all the way because its expandable foam. This is going to expand within the next half and hour to 45 minutes. It's still going to be a little bit damp on the very bottom because there is not as much air getting through it. You know honestly it's going to be better day, just so it's fully dry before you take it out of this.
Male Speaker: You are watching Thread Banger.
Victor Osborne: After you take your foam out of your initial hat shape this is what your shape is going to look like, then what you are going to want to do is you are going to want to sand it down slightly using a fine grade sand paper and what this does is it roughed it up a little bit and it makes it easier to kind of block and it smooths out your shape.
What you need to make next is a rope line. If you have like a tool band, see if you have a sander, an edge sander something like this, that you are going to use to go around and create a little ridge. You are going to use a rip just something really strong that's like sturdy that you can wrap around, loop it inner through a circle and you are going to tie it to itself and you are creating a millenary slip knot like this.
And I am just going to show you before I put the felt on it how it's going to work. You are going to put it over your block in this groove that you have just created like this and that's going to hold down your felt. The next step that you are going to want to do is you are going to want to actually get your felt to put over your block here. This is what the felts look like when you order them. If you cant find in your local area, you can always go online. There is a supplier, Hats by Leko, which is HatSupply.com, you can order whatever you want and they can ship it to you.
You are going to want to steam it or wet it inside, you can either put it on a steamer and steam it from the inside or simply get a sponge with some water and then wet the inside of it, all of it still very moist and malleable. You are going to want to simply put it over your shape. You are going to grab it on the inside like this, with the palm of your hand pushed down slightly and the same thing pushed down slightly over here and then that's going to really bring the felt down and you're really just kind of want to shape it to the actual form that we just previously made and really contour it.
This is when you are going to want to take your rope. Here we are going to want to push it down until you find where your insets are right here and you are going to want to line it up with your insets, so that you push it down, so you don't have any ruffles or seams or bumps along the form of top. Really make sure that your rope is in the rope line, you always-always want to work top to bottom, but if you work from the top, shape it how it needs to go and then push it down, it's always going to lay smooth against the form itself.
Initially once it dries which it should dry overnight, you are going to have the shape that you need and then from that point you can trim it and decorate it anyway that you want. Here are few examples of some pieces that we make here at our shop and some different techniques of trimming that you can do with them.
I hope you enjoyed our little tutorial on how to make a block, make a hat block from scratch from an existing shape that you liked and how to successfully block as well, to create a style all it is up to you. If you have any question about anything else that we do here, the Victor Osborne shop in Brooklyn. Please look us up at VictorOsborne.com and I look forward to see what you got to have to make.
Male Speaker: So have molds are just a first step, but don't worry we will hooking up again with Victor real soon for some more hat making techniques. So stay tuned.
Female Speaker: If you have any have hand making skills, take out a video camera and send in a tutorial, we will feature you on the show.
Male Speaker: So next week make sure you are following us on us twitter subscribing to the show and leaving a comment below.
Yeah I got a comment for you, what I am getting paid for this thing, my time is valuable you know.
Female Speaker: Yeah we will see you next time.
Male Speaker: Yeah I will see you next week too in your fridge.
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