The Best Hat in the World

I really think this is what the cowboy hat would look like if I'd been there in time with some polyurethane foam... More pictures

You might not agree but then you aren't the designer and you haven't been enjoying the benefits of owning one for years.

Why would someone like me design a hat?

Because I love being outdoors, working or playing, all except for:

the sweat that pools in my glasses or gets under my contacts and stings when I have to look down to work.
the flies which buzz around my ears tempting me to give myself cauliflower ear.
the burns the sun gives me on my face and neck and through my thinning hair.

In the strange way that such things happen, it occurred to me that I could design a hat that would banish those annoyances and look pretty good too.

Look good you ask? Look good?

Well... Yes, it does look good! You might have to become accustomed to it first though, because I agree, it DOES look unusual. You should have seen the first few prototypes. They were disgusting! Yet I got orders for them. But they got better - much better. Part of the improvement is due to the fact that besides being a fair hand crafter, I'm a nerd and was able to use the PostScript language to draft very accurate patterns.

I must have made (by hand, myself) more than 50 of them before I had to quit and get a better paying job. That was about ten years ago. Now, lucky for you, I've come across a connection to someone in China who's getting them manufactured there for me. You wouldn't believe how hard I tried to find a manufacturer in the USA or Mexico.

What kind of a hat is this?

Its a sun hat, outdoor hat, work hat, sailing hat, boating hat, hiking hat, walking hat, mountaineering hat, climbing hat, horseback riding hat, gardening hat, hunting hat, fishing hat, safari hat, desert hat, archery hat, and a shooting hat. Whew! This list is for the benefit of search engines and the folks who use them. Can you think of anything I should add?

The story

I designed this hat ages ago (in the early 90s) during a period of unemployment and made and sold many of them. Folks would ask where I'd gotten mine and that very often lead to a sale.

Then I got a good job which lead to the very nice pention I'm living on now and the making and selling slowed way down and then stopped. But maybe about 10 years later I serendipidously acquired a contact who knew someone in China who could make the hat and so I gave them the instructions and patterns and bought 1000 of them. Alas, selling hats as a side job was not inspiring and i didn't sell very many of them so I terminated the business and stubbed the linke that comes here.

Many, many more years went by and I thought I should reserect the hat page just for the information about the hat and now that it's been this long I've also decided to make it possible for people to make the hat themselves.

PostScript file to print the pattern as a negative at half size.
The pattern images produced by the above linked PostScript file.
The instructions for making the hat the way I did it when I made them.

Here's a link to my old store pages slightly modified to remove the ability to buy anything. This page repeats some of the information on the store home page so don't be confused by that.

This web site is copyright Richard Kandarian

Link to it, cache it, archive it, but don't copy it or portions of it without acknowledging my ownership.