I’ve been accumulating hats recently.  I’ve been piling them on my dinette table or throwing them over my couch whenever I needed the space, but that isn’t really a good long term storage solution.  The time came for me to make something on which to hang my hats.  Easy peasy, says I, I’ll just take a board, decoupage it, stick some pegs in it, and hang it on the wall.  And then I bothered to actually consider the size of my hats.  They’re big!  The three biggest are each a foot and a half in diameter!  This would take more than just a small board placed in a convenient nook.

After taking a look around, I decided to locate it in my bedroom, using the space between and over a couple mirrors.  With the odd shape of the space and the presence of a faerie-tale bed and mushroom table in my bedroom, the place seemed very much in need of a vine – a hat vine!

I love the look of metal and a curvy, flowing vine just cried out for metal.  I decided to use 1/2″ x 1/8″ rectangular copper bar for the main vine stems.  After drawing a template on a very large sheet of paper, I bent the bar free-hand (with the help of a vice) since I don’t have any fancy metal scroll-making tools.  The different sections of the main vine stems are bolted together with small screws and nuts.

The leaves are wooden hearts from a craft store that I painted in various shades of green.  I used 1/8″ diameter round copper wire for the leaf stems.  The leaves come in pairs, with the leaf stems mounted through holes in the main vine stem.  I made the holes just barely big enough, so the fit is fairly tight and then I ended up using super-glue to afix the leaf stems to the main vine stems.  I’ll probably regret this (I’m not a huge fan of super-glue), but it actually seems to work on copper really well, and the leaf stems fit quite tightly before I even applied the glue.  I suppose if the bonds do break over time, I can always do something more extreme like soldering or brazing.

The leaf stems are pushed about an inch into each of the leaves.  I felt like a high-volume discount heart-surgeon as I worked through a large stack of wooden hearts, clamping each one to the “operating table” (my work space), and drilling a hole into it.  A heart looks so sad clamped to a table.  :(

The largest pegs the craft store had weren’t quite long enough, so I mounted each one on a fat dowel, and screwed and glued that to a square base.  The bases gave me room for the wall anchors I used to attach them to the wall and they also space the copper vines away from my walls, so the metal won’t leave any marks on the walls.  The vines hang from or rest on the pegs.  I also drove tiny nails into the pegs and bent them over the vines to better hold them in place.

And that’s it!  I now have a place to hang my hats and my bedroom now looks even more like a faerie-tale!