Culture Camp

Building Baidarkas

Making Bentwood hats

Making Drums

Views of Cold Bay and environs

Bentwood Hat Making

An open crowned hat made by Andrew Gronholdt, exhibited at the Anchorage Airport. This particular hat is made of two planks which have been joined in a seam that runs down the front center of the visor.

The closed crown hats appear to be a 19th century innovation. Evidence for this is that early drawings of Aleut hunters don't show these hats. More about this at the Anchorage Museum Site.

Hat size seemed to go with rank, the higher the rank, the bigger the hat. This may seem obvious from a symbolic standpoint, but it also had to do with the cost of the hat. Bigger hats were much harder to make. Full crowned hats required wider planks. These hats had to be made with the grain running at right angles to the long axis of the visor. This meant that the plank that was used for the hat blank had to be as wide as the distance from the tip of the visor to the top of the crown.

The hats in class were made from planks of spruce which were cut to the proper shape, shaved down to 1/8 inch thickness, then steamed and bent.

This is a hat jig used in bending the steamed wood. One could bend a hat without a jig, but the jig is handy in holding the bent wood in place until it has dried out and its shape has set.

The wood that is bent in the hat bending jig has to be cut to a cetain shape to fit the jig. Here, Mike Livingston is making a paper pattern to fit the jig. This may take more than one attempt. Once a good fit between pattern and jig is found, the pattern is traced on the wood and then sawed out, thinned and steamed. The slots in the uprights are there for wedges that can be inserted to push the wood into the right shape.

Kurt after having cut out the shape of the hat blank is planing it down to the right thickness for bending.

After the hat has been planed, it is steamed and bent in the jig.