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Today is my father’s birthday.
He would have been 62.
He died in 1983 at the age of 35 from ALS – Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
I turned 35 two weeks ago, myself, and as I drank my coffee this morning, I pondered the various things that he had accomplished by the same age in his own life – a successful career, two daughters, a healthy and very loving marriage and a wonderful home in Cape Breton in the community he grew up in, with lots of friends and family nearby. I found myself feeling very small and sheepish and very, very lonely for him. I wondered to myself if he was looking down at me and what he would make of all of the silly misadventures that have brought me thus far in my own life. I like to think that he would have a chuckle and tell me to ‘keep on truckin’!’. Which is of course what The Saucy Milliner always endeavors to do.
I have many memories of my dad - aside from being very handsome with great chops, he was a very tall and very strong man. That is partly what kept him alive more than twice as long as the average 2 years that people survive with this terrible neurodegenerative disease. I remember sitting in a cardboard box and him pulling me around the house in it whilst I pretended it was the General Lee. I remember being taught that eating ketchup on toast is really quite delicious and that drinking out of the milk carton is OK as long as mom doesn’t find out. I remember him showing me how to eject an 8 track out and put a new one in on the dashboard of his Mac Truck cab. I remember riding on his Norton Commando with him and thinking that one day, when I was big enough, I would have to get a motorcycle of my own. I remember frequently fishing off of the old army bridge just down the road – up until the night it collapsed under the weight of a passing truck ( well, it really wasn’t supposed to last longer than the war…). I remember watching ‘Chips’ in bed with him, when he started getting more sick, as well as watching Star Trek, Three’s Company and Little House on the Prairie. I remember turning the pages of the bible for him when his arms had atrophied to the point that he could no longer move them and when he finally lost the use of his voice, he had to beckon me to do so with gurgles and moans. I remember frequent trips to the hospital in the back of the ambulance when things were bad and I remember my last visit with him there. I remember the night he died and my mom coming home and telling me that ‘Daddy was with the angels now and no longer in any pain’ and I remember visiting him at the funeral home to say goodbye. I remember someone at the service singing Amazing Grace, his favorite song. 
35.
I’m 35 and I am only just finding my career path. Again. I am only just feeling like I am making ties in my community and my family are 3,000 miles away. I rent an apartment I can barely afford and I can only dream of being lucky enough of finding a man who loves and appreciates me the way my father loved my mother.
And the Norton? Nope. (But I do have an Invisible Jet)
“Keep on truckin’, Kelly.”
“OK, daddy. I will. I want to make you proud.”
I reach out and turn the page…
..Exodus 20:12
Today I want to share two hats from my collection in honor of my dad’s birthday, as they were his. The first is an American made suede Cowboy hat by Henschel. My dad got this hat when he and his twin brother, my Uncle James (whose birthday it also, incidently, is) and my mom and some of their friends and family went down to Florida on a road trip after they found out he was sick. It’s a size small! I can’t believe that for my dad’s size, that he wore a small, but there it is. It barely fits me! The second hat is from when he was a driver for Coca Cola Canada. It’s very vintage and very cool. These hats mean the world to me and I am happy to be able to feature them as the first hats in my Hat of the Week entry.
I really could write heaps about how cool and how amazing my dad was, but alas, I must get to my day job.
Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday, daddy.
Hope you are rippin’ it up, Caper style, wherever you are and that you are still rocking the very cool Wolverine chops.
I love you.
 Before Wolverine....there was my dad. Check out those awesome chops.
I live 7 blocks from Kitsilano Beach.
I love it.
I never ever get tired of strolling down to the beach, looking out at English Bay and counting the number of freighters that are moored out there, waiting their turn to pick up their grain, canola oil, wood, sulphur or any other of the cargos that make up the $53 Billion in goods that trade out of Canada’s busiest port every year. That’s ALOT of canola oil.
Tonight I counted 10 freighters. About average for a Friday night. There were lots of other smaller sailboats scattered about, all in town for the Celebration of Light. It’s fun watching the sail boats arrive throughout the day, all jockeying for the perfect view of the barge that they set the fireworks off of. There are marine buoys that mark off a perimeter which is set to keep particulate that is still alight from falling onto boats that are too close and subsequently sending them down in flames. English Bay sees an influx of 1000 boats every night of the show and the beach and park become packed as everyone from Surrey and Burnaby come pouring into my little quiet neighborhood to catch this giant pyrotechnic event.
That is why I went to the beach tonight instead. I hate crowds, especially drunken ones, and I avoid them when I can. Last Wednesday I listened to the fireworks from my bed and was asleep before they finished. I was safe and snug inside my cozy little atelier, with a fresh breeze flowing through my bedroom and the sound of my white noise machine reducing the explosions of the show to dull and distant thuds. Bliss.
Tonight I toted my bocce set down to the sublimely less than packed beach where I met my friends Jill, Beverly and Robert and we had a very civilized picnic and game of bocce. It was lovely. There were a number of other parties out on the Grassy Knoll with us and I sensed a lovely spirit in the air – one of knowing that we all share this amazing city and one of being grateful for it. The air was filled with laughter, music and the gorgeous smell of bbq and ocean air. It was magic. Jill produced a bottle of wine which her and I drank out of real glass flutes (The Saucy Milliner does not do red plastic cups) and a beautiful cheese which I really must remember to ask her what it was. It was delicious and perfect.
Jill is a very talented musician and a fellow Hat Revivalist and she really evokes the similar spirit of The Saucy Milliner’s style and aesthetic in her own craft. I adore her. Tonight I gave her a delectable petit chapeaux that I had finished earlier in the evening. I didn’t know, until I had sewn the last feather onto this delightful little number that it would be for her, but as the last striped badger hackle was fastened into place, I realized that she had to have it. I am so thrilled that she loves it and I can’t wait to make more for her. I do believe I have found my millinery muse. It’s so much easier to design a hat when one is inspired by the potential wearer and she really quite embodies a certain romance, joie de vivre and era gone by that inspires me on a day to day basis and that I try to channel in my work.
As for the bocce game – well…I really am not a strong player. In fact, I am terrible. Jill and I lost to Beverly and Robert and I can’t be mad at them for winning because they are two of the kindest souls I think I shall ever meet and God made them super good looking, and it’s hard to be upset with pretty faces like that. Also: they are both Hat Revivalists as well, which make them indefinitely impervious to any sort of spite from me for creaming me at my own game. Hee hee.
Tomorrow night is the next round of Fireworks, I believe it is Spain.
Maybe I will challenge my crowd-phobia and wade down through the throngs and try to claim a little piece of beach real-estate before the main event.
Or maybe I’ll just listen to it from my comfy bed.
Dressew is a sewing supply store, here in Vancouver, that is sort of a combination of Alladin’s Cave and a TARDIS. It is situated on East Hastings, on the block east of the Scientology Centre – you know, right before it starts to get really dodgy.
One enters the store and is greeted by a smell that I always imagine to be a sort of universal ‘grandma’s attic’ smell. Probably from the years and years worth of musty fabrics which pile high onto shelves that reach up to the ceiling. Seriously, some of the material in there looks as if it hasn’t budged since 1963. It’s two levels of all the sewing supplies you could ever want. And lots of it stuff you would NEVER want! EEE! Well, except for black raw silk, which is what I went for today and which they were out of, much to my chagrin. Dang it. They DID have buckram, though, which I am pretty pleased about – I have been in before looking for it and was told they were out. Hmm. In retrospect, I think that the crotchety old lady (almost all the ladies who work there are crotchety and old) told me that they had sold out, just because she didn’t want to be bothered to find the bolt and cut me some. Anyway, today’s trip resulted in victory! I only bought half a meter because I I have never used buckram and I want to experiment with just a little to begin with. My goal is to fashion a sturdy little cocktail hat base. On with the experiment!
GETTING THERE
I should have rented the GPS.
I just got back from an amazing weekend in Seattle, where I attended a fantastic workshop in felt and straw hat blocking lead by Wayne Wichern, of San Francisco. Given the shoddy mapquest directions I was attempting to follow, it’s amazing that I didn’t end up in San Fran proper, actually. After spending HOURS trying to make my way to my friend Shawn’s place, in Bothell, I pulled into a random convenience store and tried to get the cashier to point out on my mapquest map, where we were. He didn’t seem to speak much english and I started becoming rather frustrated in his direction, with my situation in general.
That’s when a voice piped up behind me “Well, maybe I can help…”
I turned around to face my potential benefactor. The voice belonged to someone who can only be described as a blond Kevin Smith (with longer hair). Never one to turn down an offer of help, even if it did come from someone with enough mustard stains on his shirt to dress an entire hotdog, I replied, “Really?”
“Yeah, sure, I have GPS in my truck. I just need to buy some smokes and a lotto ticket and you can follow behind me to your friends house. It’s not far from here.”
I thought to myself – ‘You mean, the dungeon where you lock up unsuspecting and lost Canadian girls is not far from here…’ “OKAY!” I chirped.
I followed this unassumingly tech savvy guy out to his white pick-up truck (of course it was) and sure enough, there was his laptop set up with GPS. He punched in my destination address and moments later, after finally introducing himself as ‘Joe’, I was following him to Shawn and Bethany’s.
Getting lost on my way there was the first of many such instances over the weekend. My driving misadventures taught me that GPS is invaluable and worth whatever it is the car rental company is charging, and if one must print out maps, googlemaps seems to be far more accurate than mapquest. Still, driving around Seattle was nothing short of a Fright of the Navigator!
The Workshop!
The whole purpose of my trip was to learn how to block felt over a wooden hat block. Hat making, as Wayne puts it, is relatively low tech. You have a felt or straw hat body, you apply steam to it, you stretch it over the block and allow it to dry. Simple? In theory. I knew that it would involve the aforementioned steps, but what I was not aware of, was how much physical work it takes to stretch the felt over the block – all the while wrestling with the hood or capeline to try and anchor it into place but tacking it in and stringing it up. One uses one’s whole body in the process, it’s really quite exhausting! But, the results can be worth it, as I found out when I lifted my beautiful Bordeaux coloured, velour felt cloche from the amazing Italian block which Wayne so kindly brought for me from his studio in San Francisco. I had emailed him about this particular block after spying it in the background of one of the photos of his atelier on his website. I never thought that he would bring it all that way for me and when I saw it on the table, shortly after arriving to class, my heart leaped! I was beyond delighted! How thoughtful of him! What an absolute gem of a fellow to so generously share his knowledge of this once common trade. Millinery is a craft that is not as abundantly found as it once was a few short decades ago. It’s very difficult to get good training in and equally challenging to find the precious hat blocks that milliners use to form their creations. If anyone reading this knows of a former milliner in their family or you suspect that there may be some old hat blocks kicking around your grandparents attic, PLEASE let me know – I will gladly dust them off and get them back into their intended use!
The workshop was extremely fun and I was so lucky to have been able to participate as one of the 8 students. I am very much looking forward to seeing Wayne and everyone again – perhaps at the upcoming Hatcamp, which will also be held in Seattle this year! Please check out my flickr site for photos of the weekend and I will post photos of my finished and trimmed hats soon – I am still putting finishing touches on them! Thank you Wayne and thank you Pam. 
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