Wonderland and The Bone Room

after spending the day folding origami with my nephew, i was inspired to try again to find instructions for a pressman’s hat like my grandfather used to make for us when i was a kid. there are so many memories of my grandfather wrapped up in those hats!

i could mostly remember how to fold them… but somewhere in the middle i was missing some important step. i have lots of patterns for square origami boxes… and after all, this is just a square box… but none of them seemed to be the same as those old pressman’s hats.

well, after my nephew went home, i jumped online to see if i could find anything. somehow, this time, i happened upon the right keywords to bring up tons of information on them. (what had i been doing wrong before?) excited, i grabbed a sheet of newspaper off the stack and set to…

and was immediately aware that the proportions weren’t right! ok, easy fix. i would just cut a little strip off the bottom of the sheet. it would make the hat a touch smaller… but it would fix the proportions. i cut off approximately 3″… really not too much at all. as i folded along, i quickly realized that this was more than a little off. the largest hat i could possibly make from a sheet of my modern newspaper would really only fit a newborn! apparently,  I’m not the only one to have noticed. unfortunately, his advise to “use The Wall Street Journal before it shrinks from its roomy 60-inch web to 48 inches next year.” was given in 2006!

i’m going to have to keep my eyes out for an old newspaper to make one from. i would like to keep one with my photos of my grandfather so i can show people (ok, well, kids… the only ones who will care).

square hats made from a single sheet of folded newspaper used to be essential to pressmen to keep the sticky misting ink and flying paper lint out of their hair. somewhere in the 70’s, the machines and inks started to get better… and then the machines became separated from the pressman by glass… and now you almost never see a pressman with a pressman’s hat. a bit of history is falling away. this blog post has pictures of pressman in hats.

and if you are interested in trying it, look here for good clear printable instructions in PDF format. the new smaller size makes a cute little basket sized just right for CDs.