Figure 1.--Notice the decorative patterns woven in to the sailor hat these boys are wearing. We have seen a lot of German sailor hats with colored straw woven in. Hats with the patterns like we see here are much less common. The cabinet card is undated, but we would guess was taken in the 1890s. The boys in addition to the baby look to be about 4-11 years old. The two older boys wear sailor suits. Their younger brother weas a dressor kilt suit, it isa little difficult to tell. The studio was O. Baldin in Frauenfeld.

We notice that the weaving in most of the broad-brimmed sailor hats was dairly standard with straw of the same color. This was the case in America. We see more variety in Germany. We see quite a few German hats with colored straw woven in. We mostly see this with the broad-brimmed hats. We are not sure about the colors, but we notice dark colors. Lighter colors may have been less noticeable. For the most part this seems to have been primarily just to introduce a little color or to make the hats a more stylish. We have, however, seen a few hats in which the colord straw in use to create recognizeable patterns, like circles, flowers, and fruits. This does not seem to have been very common and we assumewas expensive. Introducing colored straw in a more random pattern seems to Have been much more common. Many of these colored straw weaving at we have found so far seem to date to the 1890s and 1900s. The examples we have found seem to be more boys than girls, but our archive is still limited. Girls of course like women were more prone to decorate their hats in individual ways with among other things, fruits and flowers. Boys never decorated their hats, although one can never rule out what mothers may have done when dressing younger boys.

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Created: 12:25 AM 5/6/2016
Last updated: 12:25 AM 5/6/2016