My name is Eldrick Jacobs,
and I am the proprietor of Flint and Port Hat Co.,
a custom-hat company.
We're in Bainbridge, Georgia,
and we were really inspired by the sights, the sounds, the textures
of the South, the colors.
So, the steps in the hat-making process,
first is determining what felt you're going to use.
We use majority beaver fur felt.
Beaver fur felt is a legacy material,
and it's a material that really
does well with holding its shape over time.
It really just presents a much higher-quality product.
So, we choose the felt, and then we choose the hat block
that we are going to use.
Hat blocks are wooden blocks that we use to mold the felt over.
And then we take steam and we infuse steam into the felt of the hat body.
Felt is nothing more than individual fur fibers
and a bio resin.
And so what we're doing is softening both of those things,
allowing the fur to open up to stretch it over the block.
And then we take that hat body that's now been infused with the steam,
and we stretch it with a lot of pressure, a lot of heat
over the hat block.
And it allows us to give
what we call an open crown to the hat body.
And then at that point, we take a knot, a hatter's knot.
We put it around the block,
and we push it all the way down to the base of the block.
That allows us to create one of the most critical points of hat making,
and that's the break line.
The break line is the space where the crown meets the brim.
And you want to get a perfect 90-degree angle there.
Otherwise, you'll have a hat that ends up kind of
misshapen, and the brim won't lay right.
We then flatten the brim with an iron, a steam iron.
That allows for us to get the brim in a place where the brim can be cut later.
So, after we've steamed, we've blocked, and we've flattened the hat brim,
we let it out to dry in front of the sun.
We take it back to our table,
and then we brim cut by using a tool called a brim cutter.
After that part,
it's the really fun part,
one of my favorite parts of the hat-making process,
and that's pouncing.
Our machine dates back to 1916, and it spins the block,
and we take different grits of sandpaper
and we really just try to refine the surface of the felt.
And the only way you know that the hat is done
in this next part is really by feel.
So we're taking off the top layer,
and layer by layer, we're stripping the felt
to a place that makes it really velvety smooth.
So, after we've pounced, we then fire it.
So, fire is a legacy part of hat making,
and it's used really to clean up the fibers on the outside of the hat.
We then create a sweatband for that hat.
It's one of the most important parts of hat making, because if you
don't sew the sweatband in correctly or properly,
the hat won't lay right on the wearer's head.
We hand-sew our sweatbands in for our custom clients.
We take our time and place every stitch onto the hat.
Now we have this moment where, what was devoid of form,
a hat body becomes a hat.
In the hat that was produced, we used a grosgrain trim,
which is a very sort of traditional way of finishing a hat.
So we made a bow for it to go on the outside of the hat.
And then we also brim bind it.
This is what makes hat making an art and skill,
'cause finding the right tension on this
is something that takes a bunch of practice.
In the brim binding,
we do use a sewing machine there so that we can get nice uniform
line of threads, so that your hat looks amazing.
So, I'm going to take the same blockers now that I used to block the hat,
and I'm going to use it to flange it.
So now what we're doing is creating a curved, upturned brim.
And then we'll shape the crown, and then you'll have a finished hat.
All by hand, intentionally made,
with a simple aesthetic.
And that's how we make a hat here.