For this week in Introduction to Fabrication, I created a hat with my logo. I desired to create something colorful and comical.

I first began by gathering my material. I ordered gold bullet cone spike and stud metal screws, a plain blue polyester hat, 2.0mm black brown leather, and a 2-Ounce Fabric Fusion Permanent Fabric Adhesive.

I measured my hat in order to identify the size of my leather that I laser cut. I first tested on cardboard.

For the laster cutter, I engraved twice with 30s, 65p, and 500f. I noticed that the leather did not smell as bad as I expected. The sides of the leather, however, were really really dirty. I constantly needed to wash my hands with soap.

I found my first design to be very poor. A lot of small bits broke off. In my next design, I used all capital letters and removed the @ sign.

While I liked my next design, I faced an obstacle with my glue. The fabric adhesive did not work at all. Ideally, I desired to hold my logo in place while I used the drill. To hide the edges of the glue marks, I printed a new logo with a slightly higher width and length.

To drill my holes, I used a very small drill bit and held the hat down. Since the hat is curved, I struggled a little with creating holes that aligned well. For example, I changed the distance of the holes slightly to the right after my first attempt. I added gold spikes to the six holes on top of the hat.

I checked out the soft lab to improve my hat. I cut the edges slightly to remove small pieces of leather that hung and I wiped the leather with Fiebing’s Milk Oil liquid in order to remove the burnt dirt.

In my final touches, I added six leather stars to the sides of my hat and I added a special pink reflective fabric underneath the leather by creating more holes with the drill. I cleaned the stars with the liquid.

Overall I really like my hat! I’m happy I experimented with leather and ordered extra material. I like my color scheme. I found the soft lab at ITP to be very helpful in the creation of my project.