My Hat log: "Characters"

I painted some crude squares using black nail polish, then layered in some red marker, and it's been so Asian-esque ever since.
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TITLE: "Characters"
MATERIALS: nail polish, marker, highlighter
COLLECTION OF: TBD
ON SALE AT: myhat09@gmail.com
PRICE: $40

My Hat log: "Bling Blong, The Wicked Witch Is Dead"

The hat in the picture below has just slivers of grip tape in the text, but this one is full-grip action—doused with a good dose of gold spray paint.

I shall call it... Goldylocks. No. Blinglocks? Bling-Blong? (The Wicked Witch Is Dead). Ha! I just saw this teensy-bopper production of The Wizard of Oz, I'd never seen so many hipped-out baby Munchkins.
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TITLE: "Bling Blong, The Wicked Witch Is Dead"
MATERIALS: grip tape. spray paint

My Hat log: "Black Gold"

I've always wanted to be one of those people who help brainstorm like, a name for a new car model. When I was a magazine editor, it was a trip sitting around trying to come up with names for a new section, it was spew-out-eriffic.

So I'll indulge my Inner Creative Marketer and present some kind of name for each hat. I thought about numbering, but shoot—they were all worked on and completed in various stages—and hell, I'll still whip out my Sharpie and tweak a hat at the boutique.

So here's my first attempt to name a hat for sale at a store... My Hatma Gandhi? OMG, no. Maybe later. For some charity hat auction.

How about... maybe "My Hat" should be in the title, since it's kind of a "title track" if you will. Oh, there it is—"Title Track." We'll call the first one "Title Track: Bleedy-Red Protoype."

For this one, what about—"Title Track: Black Gold." I like that, yeah. Okay, no. Too wordy. Just "Black Gold."
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TITLE: "Black Gold"
MATERIALS: spraypaint, Sharpie, pen, grip tape
COLLECTION OF: TBD
ON SALE AT: myhat09@gmail.com
PRICE: $40

My Tags... and the "LP" Thing

So at that warehouse in Madison where this venture began, I started writing what became my tag of sorts. I did it on this one wall, in a small section, there were some others there. 

Colleagues had been calling me "LP"—my initials—at the time, and I think when I was initialing something once, I realized that the capital "L" and "P" together read like "UP"—as they kind of bled together into one unit. "UP." I liked that. Sometimes I'd take colored eye pencils and write that tag on mirrors in bathrooms, one time in a backstage dressing room. For a long time, when I was struggling with just life, especially in college, I wrote "Forward" on a lot on things. Both words kind of have that positive connotation. Always looking ahead, staying optimistic.

One day I cut out the label inside one hat, took a paint pen and wrote "LP." So when it came to naming these designs... I guess the hats themselves are a My Hat design, by LP. But with a logo that looks kind of like the tag above—one of the retail tags I made for the hats (ha, I like the dual-meaning-usage of that). Inside the tag I listed this blog and the Facebook page. I wrote that if people send me their name, I'll add it to the caption of the hat's picture that I've posted here, and on Facebook too. As it'll be "Their Hat" and all. Collection of. Cause each hat is unique.

In Stores Now—Well, In One Store

So...you know how you keep waiting "for the right time" to move forward on a project—but really, you should just frickin' do it already? Yeah, so, this summer 2009, I sat in my apartment looking around at the hats that I'd dusted off from the secluded Chicago winter—and decided to take them to a shop. Right then.

I headed up to Wolfbait & B-girls in Logan Square (in Chicago) with about eight. Shirley Novak the Wonderful briskly picked out four, gave me the rundown on their consignment policy—and later suggested that I throw a hat on a mannequin that co-owner Jenny Stadler and an intern were dressing for the window. I threw on this hat--styled with gold spray paint, black Sharpie, pen and grip tape. She looked good. I was pleased, unexpectedly, nicely. Jenny said, "She looks like a badass." Sometimes just putting yourself out there when you're not totally ready (you think) is good because the feedback process—the real feedback process, not just your friends and family—has to start sometime, somewhere. Especially so you can start processing the details that need to be improved.

Anyways, so there's four My Hat designs by LP at Wolfbait & B-girls now. At $25 each. 

Stacked

A closer look at bleedy-red prototype.

So for about a year, a bunch of finished, unfinished and fucked-up hats (and those soon to maybe be fucked up or maybe finished more) sat around my place like house jewelry. I'd poke at some now and then, pull out a marker or a can of spraypaint and "fix" something, blah.

I had black and silver Sharpies, black silver and white paint pens, a bunch of tubes of acrylic paint, but I would use anything that was around sometimes, kind of in the spontaneous vein of the first one. I didn't have any black paint this one time, so I hunted around my place, and found some nail polish. I like using that now. I dug out some nubbier, softer colored pencils that I'd inherited at a yard sale of a friend, painter EK Buckley, who was moving to New York. I tried coffee for a lighter stain one morning.

And Then

So on another trip to Madison, I started "styling" more hats (I think I used the verb "make" before, but I don't actually make the hats, I just do stuff on them...but you know how some photographers say that they "make" pictures not "take" pictures? I like that). And when I got back to Chicago, I tweaked and preened and styled more in my place in Humboldt Park.

They didn't all have the "My Hat" tag on them. The hats became more about customization, doing something that was unique for each one, so that it was truly an individual piece that someone would be owning... (Remind me to tell you about this kick-ass documentary Tales of the Rat Fink by Ronn Mann, about custom-car king Ed Roth.)

The pic above is of some of the hats in progress in Madison. As any artist-type can understand, many of these look nothing like this anymore. That's a good thing and a bad thing of course.

In the Beginning

So I was at my friend's screenprinting warehouse in Madison, Wisconsin a couple years ago and there was a leftover hat from a job—and I remember I grabbed some bleedy red marker-pen thing and scribbled "My Hat" across it without much thought. I wore it around. When I got back to Chicago, Michael Zhou—one of the owners of Made Chicago, an urban-wear store—asked me about it. And that night someone in a bar offered to buy it off me for $50. I decided to keep my hands on it. And ordered stock to make more. Which I've been doing. Slowly. This pic isn't of me, it's a friend who swiped my hat when we were dancing at this club (I remember I spilled vodka tonic on my camera that night, der). Yeah, so she's wearing my hat. My Hat. Hey, that's my hat! Hey, that's My Hat. I'm laughing right now, it's all kind of retarded isn't it.