In a recent blog, I gave a pile of stuff on hunters’ hoods/caps. I have been wanting to make one fore awhile but Nathan Kobuck beat me to it. He did a nice little blog on it and also gave some killer eastern quotes on beaver trapping. Anyway, I went ahead and made my hood with fear of being a copy cat or a Kobuck clone. Hmmm… I would actually like to think of myself as the other side of the coin to him, he doing British stuff and I doing French. Perhaps I am his long lost evil twin, or vice versa. Anyway, silliness aside; I made a hood/cap.
For my cap, I was planning on doing something fairly simple but seeing the one Nathan made with Mike Galban’s pattern, I opted for something a little more involved. This was especially inspired by seeing a hood in the Speyer collection (shown in Nathan’s/thanks to Nathan and Mike G. for pointing this hood out to me) and also by looking at other Great Lakes hoods. I used a heavy blanket scrap for my hood (left-overs from my most recent capot) and for gores used a contrasting red wool. I chose the contrasting color as I liked this feature in some Cree hoods shown in my previous hood blog. I did a simple sawtooth/wolf-tooth ribbon edging on the front, added ties, and then did a little decor. Seeing as how many of the hoods I have seen in images had stuff coming off the ears, I wanted to do some ribbon and feather. The feathers ended up being too much so I want with just ribbon. I did end up adding some feathers (nice feathers from some of my chickens that mimic bird of prey feathers nicely). I attached them similar to what I see on the Speyer hood. Interestingly, if you look back at the images shown in my previous hoods blog, there are many others that appear to have a small bunch or fan of feathers as well. This is even seen on some of the A.J. Miller images out West.
Finally, here are some photos of the hood/cap. NOTE: I use the term hood but cap appears most frequently in documents of the period.
very nice Isaac..