Heads up! 'FREE' Panama hats!

For those Fifth Doctor fans in the UK, there is a special offer intros weekend’s (Saturday 4th July 2015) Daily Mail that may be of interest.

The paper are offering a, in their own words, a stylish Panama Hat for free (with multiple purchases of the newspaper - ah, there is always a catch) worth £19.99.

It does caveat the offer that the hat is Panama style, so not a genuine Panama-made hat.

But if you are after a cheap, but decent quality hat, it may be worth checking it out.

If you order one of these hats I’d love to hear how they look and if it was worth getting. Message me!

And the winner is.... The Fifth Doctor!

This year continues to be very successful for the costumes I have been making.

Back in February I won Best In Show for my Ultimate Six Frock Coat, and last month I showed how one of my clients won a Best In Show at a costume competition for her Romana costume.

Well I have now learned that a another of my other clients has been strutting his stuff and winning a competition too!

Late last year Bret, asked me to help him get his Fifth Doctor costume together.
He was looking to assemble the later Season 21 variant, and I was able to make him the Frock Coat, the correct trousers and a hatband.

Bret told me:
My Frock Coat, Trousers, Braces and Hatband by Steve Ricks are top notch; the quality and fit are excellent and accurate to the last degree, well worth what I paid. It is a comfortable and easily recognizable costume that is a joy to wear! The Jumper is by Bob Mitch and I blocked the Panama Hat myself.

He debuted the complete costume in late March at WonderCon in San Diego where he met up with a number of other Doctor Who cosplayers.

It’s cool to see the classic Doctors are still remembered alongside the usual Tenth and Eleventh Doctors.

There was also a Stolen Earth style Rose Tyler on hand.

Bret then attended a Doctor Who Costume Ball at Whimsic Alley, a Harry Potter themed store in Los Angeles.

Up for grabs was Best Alien, Best Companion and Best Doctor.

The Best Alien prize was won by Bret’s girlfriend Jaqueline for her Novice Hame outfit (see left).

There were about 15 entrants for the Doctor, with the majority being modern incarnations (Nine, ten and Eleven).

Not aware there was a competition taking place he hadn’t intended to enter, but after friends encouraged him, he reluctantly agreed.

Judging was by the attendees by applause and the prize was a copy of the just released Doctor Who Character Encyclopaedia.

Well done Bret!

Five Coat - the whole ensemble!

When my friends from Classic Doctor Who Props came to visit a couple of weeks back, giving me the chance to get the Six Frock Coat Pattern Trace, they also picked something up: a Five Coat I had made for Chris!

He had previously bought a pair of Five Trousers from me (see right), and having seen the Five Coat I did for Bob Mitsch, he persuaded me to make him one as well.

It was a perfectly timed commission, since I had just sorted out the Five Hatband at last, and Bob had just taken delivery of the Season 21 Jumpers (see left), the perfect accompaniment to the Season 21 Trousers Chris had already bought!

I think he strikes a dashing pose!

Five Hatband - done at last!

If you’ve been following my Six Costume blog you will have seen the Replica Cravats I have been working with some considerable success. I made them using fabric printed using Spoonflower, and have been offering them for sale for a little while now.

The screen used polka-dot cravats had been cut on the bias (diagonally across the fabric), so to make mine as screen accurate as possible, I planned out and cut mine in the same way.

This can be somewhat wasteful on material as it leaves a triangle of unusable space top and bottom.
Rather than just loose this area I sneaked in a couple of test Five Hatbands, which just fit nicely in the space available.

Luckily my plan is to cut the hatbands on the bias as well, which means I can use the natural stretch the fabric has across the diagonal to allow the hatband to flex slightly as it goes around the hat, thus stopping it from standing vertically away from the hat at the top, despite being tight at the base.

I ran prototype Hatbands on an early run of Cravats, but it took a little while to get the scale of the design correct.

Peter Davison wears the hatband with two loops of the ribbon around the hat, stacked on above the other. The ends are disguised in a single loop of ribbon running around the band at the side of the hat (see above).

To start with, the most obvious thing to do was to sew two long lengths of the ribbon to go around the hat and find some way of securing them together. This proves to be quite fiddlely and not as easy as it sounds (see below).

If I plan to sell them, I need to make the finished product as easy to mount on the hat as possible. As I won’t personally supervise this, I want to avoid having frustraited clients struggling to get them to sit right on their hats.

Somehow I got the scale of the hatband a bit on the big side, but the principle was right. It then dawned on me that I could make BOTH bands of ribbon out of the same piece of fabric, sewn with a single line of stitch, with no danger of them slipping out of position with each other.

How I have done this is my little secret, but enough to say that now I had got the scale revised and correct, my new pattern will make it work.

So, after a few test, a number of prototypes, and some further practice, I have at last got a finished and very serviceable hatband (see below).

If you want to order a Five Hatband,
they are priced at GB£25. (Hat not included!)
Global shipping is included in the price.

Email me at tennantcoat@me.com 

and I can send you full details.

Hatband - artworking the design

Having used Spoonflower rather extensively over the past few months, I have been looking for other opportunities where the ability to print short-run bespoke fabric could be utilized.

One which stands out is the hatband ribbon on Peter Davison’s hat (see left).

I can remember back in 1982, when the costume was current, noticing that the ribbon used had a rather distinctive pattern.
Whereas most polka dot patterned ribbons have the dots in a diagonal matrix, the Five Hatband has them in rows and columns. It could also be seen that there was a black ‘shadow’ dot behind the white ones.

Back in the 1980 the proportion of good quality colour photographs in print was low, so it was near impossible to find any detailed iamges to use for reference.
Despite making efforts to find the right ribbon, it proved elusive so I had to make do with a standard polka dot pattern.

So I was all the more interested to see what could be done now using the print-on-demand techniques Spoonflower offer.

A friend of mine, Mark Ferris, who goes under the username of Linx The Sontaran on the forums, had been working on a design for a while and had researched the pattern. The best photo he found as reference is shown below.

He could see the black ‘shadow’ and that is was more than just a shadow and had some form of shape to it, something like a tick.

Working with that in mind he produced a patter for the Hatband (see left) though it was not quite the right shape.
After posting his design in the forums, several people gave input and slowly the design improved.

Below is the progression from a simple tick (below left) to a better shape (below centre) before arriving at a bird like shape (below right).

Comparing it to an enlargement of the reference picture (see below) shows it is now a pretty good match.

The artwork had only been done to a low resolution, so I took a copy of the design and worked it up as a vector-graphic in Adobe Illustrator to make it pin-sharp and as clean as possible (see left).

Finding the right scale for the pattern was a little harder than I thought, as I needed to first establish the width of the ribbon, which goes around the hat twice (slightly overlapping), before working the design within the resulting space available.

I first tested it in paper, which I cut out and wrapped around a spare hat to gauge the scale. Once I had got it close to the size I thought was right I took some pictures. It is surprising how different things look in a photo to how they look in-hand. It is then possible to do a much better side-by-side comparison.

Results were good, so it was time to get a Spoonflower swatch to see how the colour was coming out, and how the fabric I had chosen to use would work.

I added the swatch to a large order I had going through, and it came out pretty well, though I felt the red could be a bit more vivid.

Some further test swatches have improved this, and now I think I am ready to order and make my first prototype hatband. . .