Your Sunday Best

People used to wear hats all the time, and up until about fifty years ago, it was practically a requirement for a proper woman to wear a hat when she went somewhere nice, especially to church. Since then, hats have sort of fallen out of fashion, and many people don't know what the hat-wearing etiquette is. In an effort to re-popularize hats, my mom and I have taken to wearing hats in our church meetings (actually, we're really just wearing them for the fun of it).

This started about two months ago, right after the Royal Wedding. I'm not British, but the wedding was kind of a big deal in the world, so we sat down to watch a recording of the 5-hour news event (we fast-forwarded through 3 of those hours). I had fun watching all the hats, which one of the news anchors said was a mandatory accessory for all the women going into the chapel for the wedding.

Don't worry - I will not wear a hat like this. Ever.

Sometime the next day, a friend of ours on Facebook asked, rhetorically, why women didn't wear hats to church anymore, since they're so fun. My mom saw that and thought, 'well, why don't we?' That Sunday, she dug out one of the few hats that we owned and donned it while we went to our church meetings. She wanted to get something started, so that eventually it would be normal for the women to be wearing fashionable hats in church (significantly more modest and less ridiculous than the hats we saw at the Royal Wedding, of course).

The black bucket hat mom wore the first Sunday.

I was a bit nervous at first. I didn't know much about hat etiquette, but I was pretty certain people were supposed to take their hats off when they went inside, especially in a church building. As it turns out, that rule only applies to men, one of the reasons being that womens' hats tend to be more elaborate, it's unrealistic for them to be coming off and on multiple times during the day. It's perfectly acceptable (and as I previously stated, once mandatory) for a woman to be seen inside with a nice hat on (as long as it's not something like a baseball cap, which no one has an excuse for not taking off). Pretty much since then, my mom's been wearing one of her hats to church every week, and after a few weeks of self-debate, I joined her.

My Halloween Hat.

I'm actually kind of a big fan of hats. For my Halloween costume last October, I sewed my own miniature top-hat entirely by hand, using thick black felt and some embellishments while watching episodes of Veronica Mars on Netflix (or Dollhouse - my Netflix history list doesn't seem to be completely accurate). At that time, my mom reminded me that we had a hat-maker somewhere in our family history, so I felt proud of myself for reaching down into my roots, and for making a hat that's pretty sweet. I told myself that I would start a hat-making business and use that as an excuse for acting insane - ah ha!

The Embellishment Vase.

A couple weeks ago, we went hat shopping, because we don't actually know how to make normal hats out of non-stiff fabric. We got a good selection, and are starting to add temporary embellishments to them for different occasions. I even added a swatch of fabric to the side of one of mine, so that I can switch out embellishment to match whatever I'm wearing.

Now we have several hats - maybe 5! -  and a vase full of uncut fake flowers and such, ready to use as embellishment. We've gone almost two months with a hat every Sunday, and no one, so far, seems to be trying to copy us (except for one older lady who's a friend of my mom's, and remembers hat-wearing from when she was my age). That's OK, however - we're not doing this to start a fashion trend. As I previously stated, we're pretty much just going this for kicks and giggles.