Last night my aerial partner and I sat down in the textiles lab to make tiny hats. How did this come about? How does one decide to make tiny hats? Well, as it turns out, the market for tiny hats, while vast in its variety and selection, is not so vast as to encompass the desires and whims of my accomplice & co-conspirator in the circus arts.

As Halloween is almost upon us, she’s doing a performance as the blue caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. Like you do. We discuss options. Blue tights? Check. Blue leotard? Check. “Something is still missing”, I think to myself. What this outfit really needs is a tiny blue fez.

A Perfect Fit? A Perfect Fit?

Ah! But where is one to acquire such a thing in this fair city? We have so many options. There’s the Piedmont Boutique, purveyors of fine sequinry since the dawn of time. Alas, no tiny Fez’s.  There’s Five & Diamond with its hats, tiny and perfect, robbing me blind every time I walk through its doors. Sadly, none are blue enough, or fezzy enough for our purposes. And let us not forget Trunk, in the Lower Haight, where I once saw a selection of tiny ironic trucker hats. They would perfect if I needed a tiny amount of irony.

Of course, we know how this ends. Our hero never finds his hat. Wandering the streets alone, he is left with one option: to go fabric shopping! These tiny blue fez’s aren’t gonna make themselves.

Like many of you, I’ve never made a tiny hat. How hard can it be? My understanding of the technique is a little fuzzy, but I believe you start by taking a regular sized hat, and then hitting it with a shrinking ray. Mine’s in the shop, so that option is right out. Just as well, as the only Fez I have lying around is red, which simply won’t do, no matter how much I shrink it.

This, fellow hat makers, is how we find ourselves going about it the hard way.