This dark hat was the most distressed bark I have ever worked with. Lots of frankenstein repair stitches. I was surprised at how many people loved this hat!
Some bark is lovely and/or has natural features like fungus and I don't want to sand and finish it. Some hats have head rings with straps that use the head ring stitches, some hats have holes punched at the edges for straps. A bigger hat needs the head ring, a smaller one is fine with straps coming from the brim. Sometimes brim straps are preferable: a head ring on a smaller hat can make you lose shade around your face, from the hat being lifted up.
This shows the difference between trying to cut a hole with scissors vs. punching a hole at the cone. The cone is the place where the bark is under the most stress, and it often wants to split there.
This was the first burning I made, a rampant fox because the recipient has that symbol as part of their heraldic device. Burning is not a form of decoration for which there is evidence from the archaeological record but I was bored with the stamps.
This hat was for a person who does pictish reenactment so I burned in symbols from pictish rock carvings.
This is the biggest hat I have ever made. It is very shallow, only made possible because the bark was from a dead tree. Bark from a live tree would have made a hat with this shallow a pitch warp terribly, but dead bark wants to curl less than live bark.
The Balmaclellan collar is a piece of metalwork from late Iron Age southwestern Scotland, thought by some perhaps to be an import from further South in Britain. I always wanted to embroider it on a neckline but never got around it it; instead I burned the collar design into this hat.
A recently-elevated laurel in Calontir asked for this Sheila-na-Gig hat, which won 2nd place at a "Make the Laurels Cry" A&S competition because it mixes time periods. I made the seahorse-unicorn "spike" hat, with wavelike Waldalgesheim meander from the 4th century BCE, as a gift to the Queen of Atlantia.
The design on this hat is copied from a gilded helmet from Amfreville, France, 4th or 5th century BCE .
I made this hat for a person being elevated to the chivalry, but it warped, which happens on most shallower-pitch hats I make using bark taken from live trees. I felt so bad about the warping I made him another hat. He asked for the same design to be burned into it, patterns from a shield-boss from Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, 4th/3rd centuries BCE.
This hat recipient requested a coin design, allowing me to combine two of my favorite things! The design is a Parisii coin. The outside bark faces in on this hat, and I used willow cane at the brim. I love the contrast of the dark willow cane and the white bark framing the head.