Good Grooming For Your Felt Cowboy Hat
A felt cowboy hat says a lot of the person whose head is snug inside it. No doubt you spent a lot of time getting the exact right hat that suited you perfectly. A lot of time and money and aggravation! That’s quite an investment riding on your head, now, ain’t it? Sure you don’t want to squander it away out of negligence. You take care of it, good, proper care, the investment will grow richer as the years pass, aging gracefully, acquiring a character of its own. I can see you, ten, twenty years from now, talking about the hat to your grandson, on a chilly night, in the warm glow of a backyard campfire.
Your great looking felt cowboy hat won’t look great if it is all grimy and dirty. Getting the dirt out of a felt cowboy hat is the devil itself. The felt is likely to get damaged in the process, too. As the old saying goes: ‘An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure’. It means that instead of spending time over cleaning the hat up, it will be better not to let the hat get soiled in the first place! The most common reason of soilage is the sweat and grime that gets transferred from your hands to the hat when you pick it up, or position it on your head. Moral: Make sure your hands are clean afore touching that felt cowboy hat.
Another simple way to prevent soilage is to handle the hat by the brim, never by the crown! Apart from preventing soilage, this will help to keep the hat in good shape. The more you handle the crown, the more it will get out of shape. There’s nothing worse than a bedraggled hat sitting on top of your head, I’ll say!
Keep the felt cowboy hat in its own box. If you don’t have the box for the hat, then hang the hat on a hat stand. The hat should be stored upside down to help it keep its shape.
Protect the hat from strong heat sources. That means you don’t leave the hat near the radiator or the furnace. Doing so will shrink the sweat band and that means you’ll not be able to get the hat to fit you again!
Getting your felt cowboy hat wet is not going to improve its looks or its shape. Felt does not take kindly to water. It gets all shrunk up, and crumpled, and bedraggled. Felt doesn’t get back into shape very easily. If your felt cowboy hat does get wet, the best thing to do is to let it dry out. This must be done naturally. Do not attempt to use a hair drier on it or a blower to get it to dry faster. There is a trick or two in getting your felt cowboy hat to dry out properly. Rest the hat on the sweat band not the brim. Turn the sweat band inside out, so that it forms a sort of collar on which the hat can rest without putting the weight on the brim. You will have to apply a little finishing touch here and there to work the creases out of the hat.
A good quality felt cowboy hat can take an occasional drizzle. Still, if you value your felt cowboy hat you will use a hat cover. Use the hat cover when you’re wearing the hat outdoors and it looks like rain. Using the hat cover to keep the hat dry will add years to its life.
I hope you understood the tips in this article. They’ll help in keeping your felt cowboy hat in perfect condition for a long time to come.
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