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Hello my name is Andrew Kress and I started going bald when I was 15 years old which for
good or ill makes me an expert at hats. We are going to talk today about breaking in
a hat whether it is the ubiquitous little baseball cap or a prize old felt when you
take over a hat or buy a hat you are going to need to break in your hat. Now the simplest
way to do this is to just take a little bit of water and work it in all the way around
the brim and sometimes I just go ahead and soak it, so that the brim of the hat all the
way around the inside where it contacts your head, is soaking wet. The next step is simply
put the hat back on, make sure it fits exactly the way you would like it to and go about
your day. Let the hat dry on to your head because it is going to assume the shape of
your head. From then on it will fit comfortably and without any changing whatsoever. Now if
we are talking about an actual hat, a felt hat and this is a beaver felt hat we are looking
at here, it will take a little bit of work to get this hat to take and hold the shape
we want it to take and hold. Now what we are going to need to do is actually work water
into the hat and if you can see here I'm just kind of gently, you can do this with a sprayer
if you like and let it soak down in. A lot of people do it by boiling a kettle of water
and holding this hat into this steam so that the steam gets into the hat. Personally I
think that that is a little rougher on the beaver felt I think steaming it should be
reserved for once a year cleaning and reblocking and that sort of thing but once we have worked
some water into the hat, I'll clean up here real quickly, you want to work the hat into
the shape that you want it with your hands and that is the very simple process of just
bending and bowing the brim until you get the look that you want. Once you have done
that you want to seat the hat on your head exactly as you would like it to ride and then
you want to reshape it again and this is the shaping that is really going to hold. Now
once you have done that you need to leave the hat on your head in that shape for at
least an hour or so but once you have left it on for an hour or so and it has dried or
begun to dry, it should still be damp you want to take it off and as always with a brimmed
hat never sit the hat down on the brim, always sit it down on the crown like so. Most hats
have a shape to the brim, usually an arc this way and if you sit a hat down on the brim
you are actually going to crush it and distort the shape of the hat brim so whenever you
sit a hat down you always want to sit it down on the crown like so. Once the hat is dry
you are going to find that it is going to hold that shape very well for many years to
come.