how to make an Einheitsfeldmütze

[moses]

next, we'll start pinning the liner and outer wool together for the final main stitch. this will be the trickiest part of all. i'll try to explain all the hardest parts and things to look out for.

start pinning the liner to the outer, with the edges folded under, as shown below. note that you want the pins on the inside and pointing counter clockwise.

[Newton30]

I go to buy the material and to try to make one feldmütze I do not have practises with sewings, I go to follow its tips moses.


Best regards,
Newton

[pzrwest]

I find if i put the pins 90 degrees to the stitchline it eases the sewing and you don't have to remove puins as you sew the needle will stitch right over the pins and so will the sewing foot. Occassionally you will hit a pin dead on but usually it just glances off.

[Ryan94]

I go to buy the material and to try to make one feldmütze I do not have practises with sewings, I go to follow its tips moses.


Best regards,
Newton

Good luck with your project!
Please post photos, when finished.

And Moses, thank you so much for this tutorial, that's really gorgeous, with the pattern and the step-for-step photos...

[moses]

newton: let me know how it goes. and more importantly, let me know if you run into any problems, or anything i didn't explain well enough, etc. i want to know how i can improve the tutorial.

pzr: you're right about that, and i really ought to get into the habit of doing that more often. for some reason when i taught myself this sewing thing, it just didnt occur to me to do it that way. there are a few stitches where that won't work, i think, because of the alignment of the fabric and things. like the stitch i'll be showing next in the tutorial.

ryan: welcome and thanks for the support, it's good to know that people are interested in this.

[pzrwest]

I might take some pics the next batch of caps i make for my distributer showing how i make m43 splinter caps. like to try my hand at wedge caps as well. Love to get my hands on a pattern for a pair of kielhozen

[moses]

more pinning.

in the top photo you'll see everything pinned in place as it should be. when you're doing this, be careful you don't make the liner too short or too tall in relation to the wool, causing an unevenness between the liner and the outer wool.

also note that that pointy ends of the bill will go up inside the hat to a certain degree. the bill cardboard will actually be inside a little, and you'll be sewing through the cardboard in a couple places. in the middle pic you'll see the tip of my thumb showing about how far inside the cardboard should be.

and one more note, as you'll see in the bottom pic, when you pin the liner around the inside of the bill, you're NOT pinning it through the upper part of the hat, only through the wool on the bill. you can see the pins in the pic there illustrating this.

you probably won't be able to get the pins through the cardboard, so just do like i did and put the pins as close to the cardboard as possible to hold it in the right place more or less, until we get to the actual sewing.

also, you probably shouldn't bother trying the hat on at this point. the pins in the fabric will change the shape of it all, and you won't get a good idea of the size of the hat until it's actually sewn. also you'll stab yourself in the head with the pins.

[moses]

I might take some pics the next batch of caps i make for my distributer showing how i make m43 splinter caps.

that would be very cool

like to try my hand at wedge caps as well.

yeah, i was thinking i might try to put together a pattern and tutorial for one of those next. i assume they'd be a lot easier, cause the visor on the m43 is about the hardest part of the thing to sew.

Love to get my hands on a pattern for a pair of kielhozen

ditto.

[moses]

the big stitch.

i'd start at the rear, as seen in the top pic. put the stitch 1-2mm from the edge of the liner all the way around, ideally.
then go all the way around, and you're done. ha ha, zing, easy wasn't it?

no, so here are the things you need to look out for:

- at many points in this stitch, the sewing machine may, for various reasons, lose its traction on the fabric and fail to advance the thing properly. you'll have to help it out here, by pulling on the fabric from the rear. this works better than pushing from the front.

- when sewing over that thick fold in the front edge of the flaps, the thing might get bunched up or tangled or something. be careful here.

- the hardest part is the transition from the sides of the hat onto the bill. go extra slow here and make sure the needle doesnt wander off the edge or too far inward, and make sure that it's going through both the liner and the wool and stuff. also, remember that at these points on the side, you'll be stitching through the cardboard a little bit. if you're not, then you didn't align things right. see the middle pic for how it should look more or less on these parts. in fact, i pushed the envelope a lot more than i needed to on this one. you'll see that the stitch goes off the top front wool right at the edge of the bill. you could easily go a couple centimeters farther into the bill area than that before going off the top front wool, and it would be fine. this step is the hardest because, although you need to align the top front wool and the bill and stuff all properly, it's all on the bottom and you can't see it. you have to do it this way because if you turned it over, the liner would be invisible to you when sewing over the bill part, and you'd have no idea how close to the liner edge you were sewing, and if it's not within 1-2mm, it'll look totally wrong.

- when you move onto the bill, after a couple centimeters onto it, about when you get OFF the cardboard, you want to pull on the top front of the hat from the left side, to get the upper front wool of the hat out of the way. you don't want to stitch through that stuff, except on the far sides of the bill.

- invariably you'll mess up at some point on this stitch. don't worry about it, just grab your stitch ripper thing and pull the bad stitches out (you don't really need to pull ALL the stitches you just did out, only the part you screwed up) and go over it again. remember if you're starting a new stitch, hit the reverse lever at the beginning and end of it so you'll stitch back and forth a bit to make the thread tight and solid.


one more thing, you'll notice that around the rear of the hat, there are two visible stitches now. it might look wrong, but as far as i can tell, it's normal. the repro hat i copied from (an ATF hat, btw) in fact had three visible stitches here. not sure why, though.

it looks like i did it damn near perfectly this time, much to my surprise.
now you can try the thing on and see how it fits. of course if it doesn't fit, you'd have to redo about half of this whole tutorial. i need to work out a better way of adjusting the hat size during construction.

[moses]

the finished stitch.

also, it's been 90% humidity the last week here, and in that time, my WH buckle that i just had hanging off a chair, has artificially aged itself. bet i could sell it for $400 on ebay now.

[Gesetz]

I made an SS M34, took only about 1-2 hours. No liner, though. Very easy to make, it's a simple concept.

[moses]

well, now you're all done with the hard stuff. it's downhill from here.
next, to finish up the ends of the flaps.

first you wanna fold the flaps down in the normal configuration and tighten them up in the front and pin them in place to get a good idea of how long they need to be. see top pic. they should be fairly tight around the hat. now, you'll want to take the outer one and fold the end back so that the new end of it will be between 1 and 2 cm past the center line on the front of the hat. pin that fold down to hold it, and now go get some more feldgrau fabric. pin about a 5cm length of it to the back of the flap, and trim the edges off. see the middle pic for these steps.

then sew that backing onto the flap by just sewing right over the stitches that are already on the flap itself.

and then, sew another stitch along the tip edge of the flap, from the top of the flap down to the bottom horizontal stitch. see the bottom pic for the final result of all this.

[moses]

next, the buttonholes. this is another potential flaw in my design, because my machine buttonhole stitching doesn't really duplicate the buttonhole style i've seen on proper repro items. if you google up "buttonhole stitch" you'll find methods for hand stitching a buttonhole which looks more proper. i need to work this into my design some time.

but anyway, to do this with a machine, you'll need to read up in the machine manual on buttonhole stitching, cause they'll explain it a lot better than i can here. do a lot of practice with it. practice with scrap wool of the same thickness, and sew it and cut the slit and slip the button through and make sure it all holds solidly. then do it on the hat. do it on the LEFT flap.

you want two buttonholes of 2cm length, in the positions shown in the top photo.

next you wanna put the flaps back in the normal position and to figure out exactly where to place the buttons, based on the buttonholes. see the middle pic, where the pins are stuck through to set the placement of the buttons in the flap underneath.

then you're gonna sew the buttons on by hand. can't do it with a machine, sadly.
assuming you've never hand sewn a button before, i'll explain. you get your sewing needle and some thread, and you thread it through until you've got like 3 feet of it hanging off the needle. snip it off the spool and tie a knot in the end of it. then tie another knot right on top of the first knot to make a big knot. this is kinda tricky.
then, stab it through the hat flap right where your marker pin is. cut the excess thread off the end, and thread the needle through the loop on the button, and back through the flap, and then repeat this like 8 more times. then, thread the needle through the little cluster of thread on the back of the flap over and over again, like 5 times, to make the thread tight, and then cut the end. (see the inset photo at bottom)

if you're using the pebbled metal buttons, you'll probably have a shiny silvery one. you'll notice that this isn't the right color. i bet some straightforward testor's model paint would suit this well. i'll have to look into what color to get and stuff at some point.


variation: there were different types of buttons used, and i think the two most common types were the 4-hole "glass" ones and the metal pebbled ones both shown at the beginning on the howto. also there were hats made with a single larger button on the flap, but i think those were not used much by the heer, mostly luftwaffe and SS. however i don't really know much about those, so i won't go into it here.

[moses]

see the back of the button flap in top photo for the finished product.

ok, now we make the shoulder board loop things. on the "misc" pattern page you'll see a couple rectangles. using the cotton liner fabric, pin and cut out two of these things. then take each one and fold the edges in on itself so that all the raw edges are on the inside and it ends up being a little under 1cm wide. pin it like so. see middle photo.

sew it shut very close to the edge. then, pin it on the inside of a flap, so that the front end of it is right about next to where the bill of the hat enters the hat itself. also, keep the side of the loop thing with the stitch on it facing the up-side of the hat. see bottom photo.

[moses]

sew it to the hat flap here, two vertical stitches, one on each end of it, about 7cm apart, and each stitch should extend a little upward past the loop thing, and the whole stitch should reverse back over itself for a total of like 3-4 overlapping stitches all the way (using the reverser lever on the machine)
see photo.
then, just cut off the excess ends of the loop thing, very close to the stitches.
repeat this for the other side of the hat, of course.

one last potentially improper thing in my design is the absence of ventilation hole rivets.
i left that out because you need extra tools and hardware to do that stuff.
not all hats seem to have had this, though, so i think it can be overlooked.