Hello Astrath,
I have been collecting uniform caps for about 35 years. I have always liked those of the period of about 1938 - 1945 most as they are in my opinion the most elegant (well, many of them, the so-called Klappmütze in Wehrmachtsschnitt) and well made caps ever. There are only a few countries (Italy for example) where you can still find elegant caps today. These are, however, constructed differently, their elegance is due to other factors and it would lead too far to explain this here.
My problem was and still is - due to facts I won't comment on here either - that I never had (even though they were "dirt-chap" some 30 years ago compared to today's prices) and still don't have the money to afford the originals. So I had to trust in luck which I really had in a few cases to get original caps, or I had to purchase modern (i.e. post-war) caps that came near to the originals, or, and this was the third option, try to make caps myself.
I started to do so when I started to collect. I disassembled some modern caps, I tried to peep inside the originals and by trial and error succeeded to sew caps with which I am sometimes content. You can see some here:
can somebody help me to exactly define a fabric? (post # 54)
Without proper training, and F.-B. states it again and again in this forum that the master cap makers had to do years of apprenticeship, an amateur like me will, however, never reach the perfection of the old masters, let alone that it is very hard to find the proper materials.
When you look at your cap you see the shell but not what is inside - such as cheesecloth reinforcements, stiffeners, the cord or rattan inside the piping etc. etc. etc. It took me some time to get all this right and then I was lucky enough to find this forum and through F.-B. Hempe, the cap making manual. Many things in there I didn't know, they were a relevation and a boost to go on trying to make caps. Sometimes they turn out well, somtimes not, but every attempt is another learning step. Unfortunately there is nobody to ask so Helen (she makes caps, too) and I just have to try things out and learn.
Many of the "cap researchers" (collectors would be too simple an expression for experts like F.-B., Bob Coleman, stonemint and many more) spent decades of their lives to accumulate all that knowledge, here they share it with us and we can and must be happy that we don't have to spend decades of research ourselves (and we wouldn't have a chance to find all this information), so do 't worry, it won't take you 10 years to learn what you want to know. By and by the expressions will become familiar, you'll know what is meant by, say, Tellermütze/Klappmütze/Sattelform and so on if you really choose to stick to it. (Some knowlege of German would be helpful, though.)
In this spirit: Happy hats, as F.-B. puts it
by ErWeSa
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