Feedback from the research & test department Bendy First impressions
Denise: I absolutely love that the bendy plastic bends in more ways than a contortionist; you can not only bend it forwards and backwards, but also sideways. The smaller the wire, the better the action. Some first tensile tests I did show that the material doesn’t stretch and can’t be broken, not even after bending it back and forth a numerous amount of times –
to break it you have to cut it. It can also easily be pierced with needles and pins.
Irene: Nice material! It can be bent in all directions and is therefore comparable with millinery wire. The advantage of bendy plastic compared to millinery wire is that the surface is larger, which means that there is more contact area. As you can make holes in the
bendy plastic, you can easily attach it to a surface, for example to a headband or hat. In addition, the material can’t rust as it is completely waterproof. You can easily cover the bendy plastic with different types of material such as fabric, leather and straw braid. You can either glue the materials on or make a tunnel with them through which the bendy plastic slides in smoothly.
The material
The composition of bendy plastic is 98– 99% polyethylene and 1–2% titanium (IV) oxide. For more information about this material, please see the wire article on the previous page.
Testing
Denise: You can burn holes in the bendy plastic using a hot pin. An inverted domestic iron turned to maximum or a general cigarette lighter can be used to round the end of the bendy plastic.
But be sure to take the necessary precautions relative to the risk assessment when doing this. The melting/ burning of any plastic is potentially harmful and dangerous! It’s not just about the fumes – you have
plastic >>
Despite the fact that hat making is an ancient craft that still uses a lot of traditional materials and tools, new and other materials that are not specifically developed for the hat industry or millinery are introduced into its world regularly. Not all introductions are successful but some become real gamechangers, such as sinamay in the 1980s, or more recently thermoplastics. The emergence of new technologies, the demand for (more) sustainable alternatives for materials traditionally used, the disappearance of materials that have been used for decades but are not made anymore, increasing costs and prices – these are all currently good reasons why hat makers and milliners may be interested in trying out materials other than the ones they are used to. In this series of articles, we test every now and then a material that we may not yet be familiar with to see whether it could be of interest to the hat world. In this issue, our researchers Denise Innes-Spencer and Irene van Vugt tested a new material in the millinery world: bendy plastic.
Pierced holes with needles and pins
Instead of heating the cut ends, they can also be sanded to get a smooth result
Bendy plastic covered with crin. Both materials are melted together at the top end; on the other end the crin is sewn to the
plastic wire
november 2023 | 59
BENDY PLASTIC
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