Today will tell about waste! So when You make a hat it goes in few steps- first you get the wool or felt, then You wet it and spin it into cones. This is a semi-complicated thing to do and there are just a handful companies who are making these cones, and they usually have quite a history, but that's a diff story! If someone is crazy enough in Baltics to do that let me know!
But when the cones arrive in my shop, I heat them and block them to the necessary size. Depending on the style- I cut the brim accordingly. I do not use a brim cutter, but I measure the brim, mark and cut with scissors. After that I usually end up with a kind of weird round shape of brim. I am not sure from where I learned this, but I started to always pay my respect to the material and put it on the floor and step inside of it.
But anyway, this excess material always remains, unfortunately we still haven't found out a way how to make a hat out of them, but we do collect all of these pieces and try to put them to use. We put bits of it as part of our gift cards, we put bits of it as part of packaging for hats, I use the material as training grounds for burning ornaments and sewing, and also as reference of colors. But still we are making more than we can use! So the moral of the story- Whenever you move, you create waste, try your best to minimize it and if not possible- try to reuse in a different way!
