About

Biography

After completing a textiles degree at Swansea Metropolitan University I took up an opportunity to train with Berkshire milliner Jane Corbett. I worked with Jane for three years before moving on to become Head Milliner at the Hungerford boutique clothing shop, Bei Cappelli. Over time I developed my skills further and found great satisfaction in seeing my own designs through to completion.

Now working from my own studio in Wiltshire I am enjoying the freedom to explore what inspires me. I can offer a service tailored to the needs of my clients, creating hats that dreams are made of.

Inspirations

Intricate scrolls on an iron gate; elaborate pleats of fabric on a dress; the delicate balance of petals in a flower – inspiration for a hat shape or trim detail comes from so many things I see in day-to-day life.

Through scrapbooking and sketching I take these ideas further, bringing their shapes and contours into the lines of a hat or headpiece. Often my designs evolve further during the making process, informed by the materials I use and the techniques involved in manipulating them.

Materials

My passion for fabric manipulation combined with the range of materials available means that I am always experimenting. I use various stitch work and other techniques to achieve different structures with straws, sinamay, felt, feathers, and silk fabrics.

After dying a material, usually to match a colour, I hand block with traditional wooden hat blocks to shape the base of a hat. From there, I often transform the base shape by hand to create one-off pieces.

I get great satisfaction from the process of re-shaping or re-trimming an old hat, updating it and making it useful again. Old hats are often a good source of interesting straw types or unusual material trims, and can be taken apart and re-structured or dyed, to create something contemporary and wearable.

There are so many interesting materials to work with and so many sources of inspiration for me, and I’m always thrilled to be working on a new design.

What my customers have to say...