As You Like It Design

Both painter’s cap and cycling cap styles have been posted to the Etsy shop for your browsing pleasure.

Go ahead and see what’s new!

I want to give enormous, heaping thanks to everyone who came out to the swap meet & checked out my wares, and even bigger thanks to folks who made purchases or made arrangements for custom orders.

Let me just say that you’re only encouraging me!

Of course, my normal enthusiasm led me to significantly overstock for the swapmeet, so come back soon and see what I’ve got up on Etsy. There will be many new items in my shop as soon as I get a few solid hours to photograph and post them.

Also, while I’m here and on a roll, I want to recommend that you check out Re-Velo, which is a super cool line of accessories made from re-cycled bicycle innertubes. If you’re in the market for an indestructible and water resistant wallet, this is well worth a look-see.

I’ll be at the famous, annual Everything Bicycle Swapmeet with a wide selection of hats in several styles and many colors. You can choose from subtle, somber fabrics or the wildest, most flamboyant combinations I have made to date. A range of my new Painter’s Cap styles will be available, as well as my classic, Italian-style cycling caps, and possibly a few mystery styles.

I’ll be offering discounts off my online prices, as well as the opportunity to arrange for custom work.

Come and check it out!

I’m going to be moving As You Like It Designs main page away from Wordpress onto a self-hosted site (though it will be still run through a Wordpress template) and so things may be a little wonky around here this week. Please bear with me!

Also, please bookmark my webstore at Etsy because I am going to be loading some fresh new styles up there this week, too!

Busy…

Busy….

Busy!

So, I’m back making hats once again and I’ll tell you what kicked me in the butt and got me back “in the saddle again,” so to speak. It’s that hat you see above and below.

It is one of the three dozen original As You Like It Designs hats I made for the ACME swap meet 3 years ago. They’d initially received a pretty lackluster response; only small children and a couple of my friends showed much enthusiasm for my designs, and it just seemed like the local market wasn’t ripe for bright, funky, girly hats. Woe! So I packed up my wares and considered the enterprise a bit of a washout.

Well, I kept out a couple of hats for my own use. I wore a red-and-yellow plaid seersucker cap on our coast-to-coast trip for containing my hair and sweat, as well as providing some shade for my eyes since I don’t have any sunglasses. It performed all of these duties admirably, as well as held up to two months of daily wear and bi-weekly washings with gas-station handsoap. You couldn’t find fault with the functionality and durability of that funky little hat!

I have two others, one a pink-and-white striped and floral affair, and then the exuberantly floral effort pictured above, and it was this flowery hat that I chose to wear to the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in order to contain my unruly, winter-static-crazed hair, and also because it looked really good with the sweaters I packed.

While we were at the show, people kept stopping me and asking me where I’d gotten my hat. There was a vendor there, Snappy Caps out of Lincoln, NE, who does kind of similar work, though she does four panel, and I’m a pretty firm devotee of the three-panel design. Anyway, people wanted a hat like mine! I kept sending people back to the Snappy Cap booth, telling them that they had the freshest colors in-house, but that my hat was home-made out of scrap from one of my favorite skirts.

My hat made me memorable. On Friday, after the show & after dinner, we went to a happening of sorts at a downtown art gallery, and I got even more inquiries about my hat. I was actually starting to wish I’d grabbed up the remains of my back-stock and could dole them out of my backpack. I mean, hey, people seemed to want ‘em and I sure could use the cash.

Then, on Saturday, we went back to the show to scope whatever we might have overlooked on Friday, and a pair of journalists from Momentum Magazine approached Joel and me. The one woman, whose name is Amy, said she recognized my hat from the gallery event and wanted to interview us regarding our cycling habits and impressions of the show! Who’d have though a hat made out of scrap fabric that I though nobody wanted would make such a big impression?

What I learned was that there apparently is a market for whacky cycling caps, it just might not be local. So, when we got back home, I went through my stock of existing caps, as well as my extensive stock of caps I’d cut out, but lost interest in assembling. For the past week-and-a-half-ish, I’ve been stitching up caps like a madwoman. I’ve changed the design a little, eliminating the terrycloth sweatbands I’d originally used and employing a natural cotton twill-tape instead. After I sew my way through the hats I already have cut out, I will be standardizing my design. I’ll be offering three adult sizes (S/M/L) and a children’s size, since my hats have traditionally be a big kit with little kids. When I get done with my pattern-drafting, I’ll come back and post the specifics of the sizing and get a run of standard hats up and online.

Watch this space, because soon I’ll be posting up a listing of my Version 1.0 hats for sale. This first run of hats will be sold at a bargain price, since the fact of the matter is that they are essentially prototypes. They are all of good construction and materials, but the design is still somewhat experimental. I’m fine-tuning some of the details of design, and will soon have a totally reliable pattern for better fit and more accurate sizing.