Jellyfish Hat

For this project I decided to base my design on a jellyfish. I am very interested in underwater creatures and when I was searching for inspiration I came across some jellyfish photos. Jellyfish have a very unique shape, which instantly reminded me of a hat. I thought of the structure and how I could create a unique hat inspired by the shape of a jellyfish. I designed my hat completely off photos of jellyfish, then I researched other jellyfish textiles work, to give me inspiration for different materials. I particularly admire how one of a kind jellyfishes are, and this competition gave me the freedom to experiment with the design and idea and create a unique hat.

-sewing machine and sewing materials

-3d printer

-shiny gauze fabric in white and blue/red

-mouldable metal wire

-beads

-plain pink and white fabric

-free motion embroidery hoop and circular foot (optional)

-small white LED torch / light

For the first step I created the 'inside of a jellyfish' with a tight hat design. This ensures the hat will fit on your head and is the inner part, yet it is still visible from the outside.

I measured out a circle that would roughly fit like a hat around my head, I made sure it would be quite tight and secure.

I started by measuring a 'flower' like circular shape, made up of 10 different cone shapes on plain white fabric.

I cut these out then i did the same on a pink fabric.

I then started sewing the cone shapes together on a free motion embroidery hoop, with fabric underneath which adds an extra layer of structure to the hat, you do not have to use an embroidery hoop for this step, however i would recommend it for the next step.

I then added some simple and messy embroidery patterns to five of the shapes, which would be the front.

I then cut each of these out and began sewing them back together in their circular shape to make the hat.

Next I added a thin strip of fabric and folded it around in a circle and sewed it to the bottom of the hat. This is to create structure and support, I threaded a mouldable thin wire through, and moulded it to fit my head.

For this next step I worked on the inner structure of the jellyfish, and how the exumbrella which is the 'see through hood' of the jellyfish is further out than the inner part. I worked on creating a structure for this to extend it out.

I created a long strip of fabric again and folded it over to make space to hold the wire. I folded the wire in half to make it stronger and moulded it into a circle which which fits around the top of the base hat.

I then made a bigger circle and attached the circles at an angle so that the bigger one would be slightly higher. I attached these with smaller wires moulded into supports.

I then covered this with a shiny fabric and sewed it into place. I folded the strips of fabric and then sewed one end together, before placing it around the wire then sewing it fully up.

this step is explained more clearly in the photos.

I then worked on the second part of the skeleton/structure, and decided that 3d printing it would be much more efficient that trying to mould the wires as they are not as solid.

I used Tinkercad as its very user friendly and I am able to understand it easily, and I have used it before in school. This is the process for making the Tinkercad design

For complex shapes, like the kind we need, I find it is often easier to use the code blocks feature in Tinkercad.

The first part of the process is to make a ring shape and then duplicate it and rotate it by 30° 12 times. This will then give a complete circular shape with a segmented design. The origin of rotation needs to be moved a small amount (+5 on y axis) to give the shape that we want.

The blocks in the illustration demonstrate how to do this.

Once we have this initial shape, we add a hole in a cylinder shape to effectively subtract this from our complicated 12 segment shape. There is a process of trial and error to resize this hole to remove all the parts we don't want. We now have a ring shape with 12 segments in it.

The next part of the code creates a thin torus shape that is the same diameter as our segmented ring shape. We then rotate this through 90° around the X axis to create the hoops that will form the top of the hat. Again, we duplicate this shape and rotate it 30° 6 times to create multiple hoops.

To get our hat shape we then make a cuboid shape that is a hole and subtract it from our shape. This takes away the bottom half of our structure to leave a hat shaped frame.

The finished shape is too big to print on our 3D printer bed so the final part of the code shown creates 2 cuboids of holes and subtract them to create a quarter of our hat shaped frame.

This final shape is then scaled up to ensure that we will have a hat diameter of about 30 centimetres when we 3D print our segments.

The 4 quarter shapes were printed on a Creality Ender 3 V3 in PLA (0.2mm layer height) then glued together with superglue.

For the next section I worked on the ‘hood’ part of the jellyfish structure and I cut out a piece of shiny see through fabric to fit around my structure.

I then cut out cone like pieces to fit on top, I sewed each of these in place and I added a thicker piece of the same fabric to go on top.

Next I got thin strips of the same fabric, but folded them to make it thick, and I sewed these in between the gaps of the cone shapes

I then cut out a strip of the same type of fabric which would be long enough to fit the outside of this. I sewed along the edges so to extend it and keep it neat. I then sewed this to the edge to extend it.

I then repeated this step but made it slightly thicker, and hand sewed different beads to the end. I then sewed this onto the outside of the fabric which extends it and makes it hang down.

For the next step I worked on the tentacles.

I cut out long strips of the different shiny fabrics then I folded these into long thin shapes and sewed around the middle.

I did different styles and combined the fabrics for some.

I then sewed these to the bottom part of the skeleton, onto the fabric underneath

I stuck the bottom part of the skeleton to the fabric base hat.

Then stick the 3d printed top structure to the bottom part.

Then put your led light inside this structure and put on the top fabric covering, this ensures that you can take out the LED (and change batteries)