My best friend, Michelle, (who gave me the dress in The First Hat) was getting married, and I knew I wanted a hat for the occasion.
 
She’d asked me to sing during the ceremony. “We like this song, ‘The Wedding Song’? Have you heard of it?”
 
“Everyone’s heard of it,” I replied, relieved that she hadn’t asked for something more obscure and difficult. Having never sung a solo at a wedding before, I was glad to sing a song I already knew. Hopefully familiarity would keep my voice from quavering.
 
Michelle had a beautiful outdoor venue for the ceremony, so a hat would be very appropriate. And one day, as I was walking through an art fair, I saw this blue hat. I especially liked its small brim, which wouldn’t block my vision or get in my way during singing. I really liked the blue color, as well. I was sure I could easily match it.
 
Well, I couldn’t. It turned out the hat was a warm grayish blue that didn’t match any of the summery, flowery frocks I’d pictured. I finally settled on a print coat dress of navy with light blue accents, not a typical dress for a garden wedding. Here we are, after the ceremony:

I put off writing this post because when I started this blog, Michelle and I hadn’t talked for a couple of years. Even when we’d lived nearby, it was hard to get together. She worked full time and had two kids. Since I worked evenings, our schedules didn't mesh well for phone calls, and we'd usually have to try several times before reaching each other. 
 
Because of her kids, going out was difficult for her and coming to my house was just as hard. So if we got together, it had to be dinner at her place. I felt bad never being able to host.
 
And of course, our lives were different. She had children and I didn’t. She had a high-powered job and I worked part time. We didn’t work in the same field or pursue the same hobbies. However, a friend you've had since grade school is not like another friend. You've known each other so long that history has a gravitational pull that helps hold you together. But that pull can weaken.
 
After I moved four years ago, she’d called me a few times, and once we’d gotten together when I visited the Bay Area, but it was hard keeping in contact. She’s not on social media. She had a home email but wasn’t in the habit of checking it often. I didn't have a smart phone and didn't text. 
 
One day when I was feeling sad and lonely after the move, I wrote her a note saying I didn’t think we should keep up the friendship if we had so little contact. 
 
Of course, when I was over my depressed mood, I regretted my note. I treasured our contact, even if it wasn't constant. I wrote her a couple of emails to the old email address I had, but I wasn’t sure she’d even gotten them.  I sent Christmas cards. I could have called her, but I hesitated. I wasn’t sure she’d want a call from me, since I’d been the one to sever the friendship.
 
When I wrote about her in the first hat blog entry, I emailed her to tell her about it. As usual, I wasn’t sure if my mail had reached her--the address was over four years old, and she had never seemed to check it much. 
 
Months passed. When I was preparing to write about the Black Cloche with Red Flowers, I searched through my stash of old pictures fruitlessly for the shot of me at the ship’s wheel. Then my husband got out his box of pictures. While looking through them, he came across some I’d taken of Michelle and her sister and mother at her bridal shower. (I didn’t have a camera at that time and had borrowed his.) We had double prints. I gathered the extras of the shower pictures and sent them to her.
 
She called me to thank me, and we talked for the first time in a few years, catching up.  Being reconnected felt wonderful, a burden lifted, a tie restored. I'd missed Michelle, her warmth, generosity, and humor. When the pandemic struck, we texted each other to make sure our families were OK. And then, when I wanted to write this post, I texted her, asking if she was OK with me using the wedding picture.  She said yes, adding how cute we looked. I think we look cute because we look so happy.
 
So, it’s a good thing I waited to wear this hat, so I could give the story a happy ending.  Michelle holds a special place in my heart. With no one else outside my family do I have such a shared history: gathering in our grade school club that met under a pine tree, drinking lemonade in her tree house, calling before seventh grade started to discuss what outfit to wear, passing notes on the high school choir tour bus ride, listening to each other’s early heartbreaks, serving her my horrible first attempt to grill fish in my first apartment,  introducing boyfriends, being in each other’s weddings. Being there for each other through so much of life. I’m glad I didn’t lose Michelle, whose friendship means so much to me. 

​Of all the art fair hats I’ve bought, only the milliner of this one, Delores Pride, put her phone number in it. I haven’t called it—that was her phone number in the 90s, but it shows that this is a pre-internet hat. Now a hatmaker would likely put in a URL, or even a Twitter or Instagram handle.
 
I don’t know whether she still sews hats or not, but this is an especially well-made hat. The bow is on a pin for decorative flexibility, but she’s tacked it down to stay in place. So you can remove it if you like, but as long as it’s on the hat, it’s staying put and not curling or shifting.
 
The style is cute, too, sort of an adorned, slightly casual pillbox. So why haven’t I worn it for years?
 
The fabric. I loved it when I chose it, but to me, this hat’s fabric has not dated well. The tapestry look has not been in style for a while. If you don’t believe me, type “tapestry vest” into Etsy and see what wonders from the eighties and nineties come up. Also, though when I bought this hat, I thought of it as purple, in reality it has just as much beige as purple. Beige is the color (if you can call beige a color) that looks the worst on me.
 
I would probably still wear it often if I had simply chosen a different fabric.  
 
I had a plan for wearing this hat…I was going to go wine tasting. The pattern is of grapes and leaves:

​I thought it would be a nice fall hat, but I didn’t get to it this fall. No problem, I thought. I’ll wait till spring when the vines leaf out again. Of course, I didn’t count on every wine tasting room being closed.
 
So, instead of tasting, we drove out to a local winery for curbside pickup. They kindly let us walk around the grounds. If you have a favorite local business to support (be it winery, restaurant, auto shop, etc.) now is the time!

Return to The Hat Project main page. 

I was out of work.

For the first time in my professional life, I had quit one job without having another job lined up. As I wrote in The Black Cloche with Red Flowers, the company I worked for had been acquired, and given the option to work for the new company or take a severance package, I took the package. About a year prior, I'd been through a horrible acquisition, and I wasn't ready to repeat the process. I told myself that the job market was hot--I already had a few leads. I told myself that the severance would give me a cushion, see me through the rest of November and the holidays, and I'd easily get a job in the new year. 

Then, the first day I woke up without a job, I panicked. The hours stretched before me, empty. After almost ten years of full-time employment, I didn't know what to do with myself. I worried, too, that I'd never get a job again.

I called up my older brother, who had been laid off in the past and found a new job. He talked me down. It would all work out. I'd find another job, he reassured me. I'd get used to not working.

He was right. I did get used to not working, and it didn't take me long. I spent the next two or three days lounging in bed reading. Just reading for days, the biggest luxury I could imagine. Though my then boyfriend (now husband) had also taken a severance package, he had accepted a month's temporary assignment as part of the transition. While I'd envisioned us spending some time together, I was also happy to read. I did some writing. I baked Christmas cookies, something I usually had no time for. The days passed quickly but quietly.  I had some job nibbles, but no offers.

One day I went to a holiday craft boutique at Stanford. I was looking for Christmas gifts, but as sometimes happens to me, I found a hat instead. Brightly colored, made of soft velvet and satin, this hat attracted me on sight. But I dithered. Jobless, I knew I shouldn't spend the money.

"I love the hat, but I'm unemployed," I told the hat maker.

"Change you hat, change your luck," she answered.

I bought the hat. And by the new year, I had a job offer.  

I can't honestly say my luck turned from bad to good, because I was lucky to be able to take a little time off, and I was lucky to get a job offer. But I was relieved.

A company called Netscape hired me. They were the first company to sell a popular web browser that allowed people to access the Internet in a user-friendly way. Most people at that time (me included),  did not have access to the Internet at home. Many people didn't even own computers. And of course, smartphones were nonexistent. It's hard for me to envision that world now. Netscape employees would go to company meetings where the CEO would tell us the Internet was like the telephone. We just needed to get enough people on it and it would take off.  More businesses would start having a web presence. At that time, relatively few businesses sold products over the web. Amazon was in its infancy and only sold books.

Netscape was a wild ride. A lot of people worked crazy hours there (they had a room full of futons if you pulled an all-nighter). But I managed to keep my perspective. For one thing, I couldn't work constantly because I wanted to spend time with my boyfriend. 

At the last party for shipping a product at our old company, we'd danced together to a reggae band on a rooftop in downtown San Jose. Now that we were dating, we went to hear that band, Inka Inka, in a small club in San Jose. I  wore this hat to the club and danced with him to the band again.

I had a beautiful hat, an exciting job, and a great boyfriend. I had extraordinary luck. 

As a send-off before the acquisition, the department took a day trip—sailing from Santa Cruz to Monterey on a chartered sailboat, having lunch on the Monterey wharf, and returning to Santa Cruz in a limo. I wore this hat on that trip. Here's a picture of me in this art fair cloche taking the ship’s wheel with a look of nervousness and delight on my face (I kept thinking of the Gilligan’s Island theme).
 
For the first time on this trip, Russ and I were a bit more open about hanging out. After all, we would both be leaving the company soon. We sat next to each other at the group lunch. (A couple of people ordered lobster on the company dime, but as a vegetarian I contented myself with pasta).
 
The next day, back at the office, one of my coworkers commented that Russ and I had spent a lot of time together.
 
“We’re dating,” I told her, the first time I had said it aloud in the office.
 
“I thought you two would get together.”
 
I was surprised. Apart from anything else, I’d had a different boyfriend for part of my time at the company.
 
“You were single; he was single. I thought something would happen.”
 
If only it was that easy to find the right person, I remember thinking.
 
I feel incredibly lucky to have met my husband. Christmas is a time to remember your blessings, and he’s been the greatest blessing of my adult life. This picture is taken in his hometown, in Santa’s Sleigh on the main downtown street.
 
Wishing you happy holidays!

PS--In this close up of the hat, you can see that the flower decoration is a detachable pin. I've worn it on the Madame X Hat sometimes to jazz it up.

When I bought this hat, I thought I would wear it a lot. Like The Floppy Red Hat, it's a good hat for a cold but clear day, when you want your head warm but also need a bit of a sun shield.  It was made by the same milliner who made The MVP Hat. At first, I wore this black velvet hat often, especially in colder conditions.

So, what happened? I made the mistake of wearing this hat at a particularly bad time of my life. I had tennis elbow in both arms and wore braces continually. My arms were weak and painful, and I wondered how much longer I could carry on working on a computer keyboard. One cool evening I wore this hat while doing yardwork. I was picking up the fruit that had fallen off our big Santa Rosa plum tree in our front yard.

We were buried in plums, unable to eat as many as we had, yet I still felt I had to bring them in the house, where the majority of them rotted on the counter before I could do anything with them. A miasma of fermenting fruit pervaded the house. The tree hung over the sidewalk, making a sticky, slippery mess. I raked up fruit and hosed off the cement so passersby wouldn't slip and fall. I lugged armloads of smelly, half-rotten plums in the garbage. My arms were killing me and I felt close to despair. 

Of course, my situation improved. My arms got better with time and rest. A lady knocked on our door the following year and asked if she could trade flowers for our excess plums. She took them to make jam, and since she was a florist, gave me lilacs and gerbera daisies and Christmastime holly.

Yet, this hat still felt stained to me. Every time I looked at it, I remembered the dark time.

But when I started this blog, I said every hat.

I chose a particularly happy day to wear it again; a trip to the ocean with my visiting mother. And, we went to see sea otters, which I often do when feeling down. They are a sure-fire mood lifter. You can see them in the first picture, blurred out lumps in the ocean behind me. 

So now I can look at this hat, remember otters, and smile. And, in case you need cheering up, here's an otter video I took that day.

It didn’t start out this way. I saw this cute hat at an art fair. I really loved the fabric—even though it was a basic bucket shape, I thought the fabric made it look more sophisticated. (Though it’s reversible to a beige fabric, as with my other reversible hat, I only wear my favorite side). I used to wear this hat at a jaunty angle with a pair of dangly earrings.
 
But then, one day I was having a bad hair day. Maybe I didn’t blow dry it right or I bedheaded it taking a nap. And I thought, “I’ll hide it with a hat.”
 
This hat, because it covers so much of my hair, seemed perfect.
 
And it was.
 
It’s like one of those sad movies, where the aspiring artist can’t sell her serious work but discovers a knack for advertising art. Or the musician is born to play classical music, but the crowd loves show tunes. This hat was meant for so much more, but it’s such a great bad hair day hat that I forget to wear it otherwise.
 
“Nice hat!” someone will say.
 
“Bad hair day,” I sometimes reply.  But other times I just smile and say, “Thanks!”

I was about to go overseas for the first time, to Hungary in the middle of summer. I knew I’d want a hat. At an art and wine festival, I saw a lovely flowered straw hat that felt right when I put it on. Sometimes you try on a garment and know, in your bones, it should be yours. That’s how I felt about this hat.
 
Only one problem: it didn’t flatten out for putting in a suitcase. Plus, the silk flowers looked delicate. “Do you think I could pack it for a trip to Europe?” I asked the milliner.
 
“You could put it in your carry-on,” she suggested, sounding a little doubtful. “Or, just wear it on the plane.”
 
I was skeptical of either method, but I loved the hat so much I bought it anyway.
 
A couple months later, when I was packing, I realized if I brought the hat to Hungary, either I would crush it, or I’d spend a huge amount of effort trying not to crush it. I left it at home. I ended up buying a simple, flat-pack hat in Prague (which of course I’ll wear in an upcoming post).
 
So, this hat did not get to go to Europe. However, it has gone just about everywhere else with me. It’s the perfect size and weight. Its brim is big enough to shade without being so big the wind catches it. It’s heavy enough to resist most wind as well. It’s a great beach hat, winery hat, picnic hat, farmer’s market hat, outdoor concert hat, anywhere hat. I wear it all the time. It’s my MVP.

I bought this gray beaded hat at an art fair many years ago. It was made by Jax Hatz San Francisco. Because it covered my ears and wouldn't blow off, I wore this hat a lot while driving my convertible. I also wore it after top-down driving, especially if I had worn a ball cap—this hat hid hat hair nicely.
 
As the hat has seemed to loosen up over the years, I have worn it less often. I also find myself driving top-down less than I used to. Maybe that’s the loosening up in me, a laziness that doesn’t want to take down and put up the manual top, a skittishness about getting a headache from too much sun.
 
In this picture, I’m posing before the Carrizo Plains wildflowers—we didn’t travel top down because the rutted dirt roads would challenge my low slung car (and the dust would coat the interior). I put the hat on for the shots, and then was glad of its warmth when the wind came up as the day went on. I remembered why I had always loved this hat: it’s comfortable, neutral yet slightly blingy, and cozy around the ears.
 
Here are some old pictures of my travels in this hat:  In Monterey in 2001 and driving the coast  in 2011:

​This week I wore another hat that I’ve never worn before, but this time more than timidity kept me from wearing it.
 
I bought this hat at an outdoor art fair on a warm summer day. I got the feeling that the young lady selling the hats hadn't been at it long. “Do you have a bag for it?” I asked. She looked puzzled, regretful, as if she’d never considered that someone might want a bag (note—this hat dates from the days when all retail establishments and art fair vendors gave out bags).
 
So I took the hat without a bag. My husband offered to go into a nearby store and see if he could buy one, but I said, “No, that’s OK.” Big mistake. As we walked through the art fair, my hands got sweaty. I held the hat gingerly at the back, but when we got home, I noticed that my sweaty palms had discolored the back of the hat. I was upset with myself for not just getting a bag from somewhere, anywhere, and upset at the hat seller for being so unprepared.
 
I wasn’t sure if the hat was made from a washable material—from the way it discolored as I held it, I doubted it. It might even be of acetate. Once I tried to wash an acetate dress and it turned into a stiff shriveled lump.
 
Honestly, I knew the stain wasn’t too bad. But it was noticeable, and it was a brand new hat, dammit!

So I put it in a box.
 
Looking for a different hat I thought I might wear, I opened the box and found this one in there too. I still liked it. And though I knew the hat was discolored, it was no more discolored than some of my vintage hats, to be honest. So I decided to wear it.
 
This hat initially attracted me because it reminded me of the hats worn by members of my favorite swing trio, Cats & Jammers (sadly, now defunct, though you can still buy their recordings). I decided to wear it to church on a Sunday I was singing with the choir in front of the congregation. That way, I would both honor the musical inspiration for buying the hat and, since no one would be sitting behind me, hide the discolored back. After the service someone said I was “rocking” the hat. I thought that was an appropriate term.
 
I can’t play guitar or bass fiddle, like the women in Cats & Jammers, so posing with my ukulele was as close as I could get.

Brightly lit picture showing the discoloration that I hope isn't too noticeable in dimmer lighting.