Making a hat takes craftsmanship and time. Let us guide you through the steps that are necessary to take when a SoonNoon hat is made. These steps are focusing on the process using felt, but most of the steps are equally applicable for straw.

1. Each hat is made from a single piece of felt that is steamed to open the fibers and making the felt shapeable. The felt is placed over a wooden block, shaped and sized to fit every customer.

2. To keep the felt on the block in the desired shape and size, it is tied with a block string. This also gives the hat its clean 90° break between the crown and the brim.

3. Once the felt is firmly in place, it’s time to flatten out the brim with a heated iron and leave it to dry for several hours for the felt to mold into the shape of the block.

4. As the felt has dried, the phase has come to sew in the leather sweatband by hand. We use authentic leather sweatbands that we cut to the right size and stitch together and add a small ribbon to indicate what is the back of the hat.

5. When the leather sweatband is in place, we add the ribbons, cords, and edge binding, etc, depending on style we wish to create.

6. Now it’s time to hand-shape the crown and brim to the desired style of hat – lots of steam and fine tuning is required.

7. In the last phase we sew in our signature time stitches to make it an authentic SoonNoon hat.