COLUMN
workshops go down in Beijing? I decided that I wanted to try it out where I felt more comfortable first, before I offered it in China.
Due to the school schedule, I had two and a half months outside of China every summer, either in Atlanta, Georgia, USA (with my parents), or in Blaricum, the Netherlands (with my parents-in- law), so the kids could spend time with their grandparents. I grew up in Atlanta and my mother has had an art school for children there since the 1980s (read: a very long list of potential hat makers!). So I decided that would be a perfect ‘safe’ place to try out my workshop idea – doing it my way with the materials I choose.
A workshop at the Australian Embassy residence in Beijing, 2016
Mom loved the idea too and I got to work. I checked if the factory I used to produce my ready-to-wear Blue Label Collections would be willing and able to make the sinamay pieces I wanted for the workshop, in the way I wanted them to be made. The ready-made sinamay bases available online were weak with only two layers of sinamay, and the edge was always made of some cheap polyester ribbon and had crooked seams. This was just poor quality. I wanted my bases to have three layers of well- stiffened sinamay with millinery wire, a metal joint and a sinamay bias edge with a perfect seam. They could do it, but I did have to order 100 of each shape and colour. The same applied to the sinamay bias strips I wanted for the workshoppers to make decorations with, and I needed many colours of those. I was also quite adamant that I wanted metal headbands wrapped with thin petersham ribbon to fix onto the fascinator base when ready.
Set-up in a mall in Chongqing, 2016
To add to these materials, I bought many different faux flowers, endless metres of veiling in black and ivory, every colour of pipe cleaner to make snowflakes, feathers, and I already had boxes full of buttons and beads, ribbons and lace. I also had to buy lots of thread, pincushions, scissors, needle threaders, needles, pins and thimbles! You have to think of everything, even plasters for when people poke themselves with a needle – and that happened all the time. And I wanted everyone to leave with a proper Elisabeth Koch Millinery hat box, filled with their very own creation. Luckily, and purposely of course, these are flat-packed and pop out to be six-sided, and I had a thousand piled up in my back room in China (no exaggeration).
A workshop in Chongqing, 2016
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