Spotlight: Jamie Carter wears many hats, and he makes them, too

Jamie Carter carries a cardboard copy-paper box overflowing with pink, zebra and other decorative fabric. On top of one side of the box, he gracefully balances a Styrofoam mannequin wig form. In his other arm is a hatbox. It’s after rehearsal at Sarasota Ballet, and he walks toward the screening room on the third floor of FSU Center for the Performing Arts. The Sarasota Ballet dancer unloads the box, and displays feathers, buttons and decorative odds and ends.

When Carter is not dancing, he’s a hobby milliner, or hat maker. Carter explains that it started in 2009, when Sarasota Ballet added “Paquita” to its program at the last minute. The costumes were ready, but the 14 headpieces still needed to be created. Carter volunteered for the job.

Since his first foray into hat making, he’s formalized his process. He’s self-taught, and he occasionally follows online tutorials or courses from hatacademy.com. He has a notebook full of sketches and notes on fabric. 

“For me, it’s just a hobby,” he says. “I’d never stop dancing and just make hats all the time.”

He says sometimes there is a little snobbery in millinery. It goes above and beyond just attaching a few decorative pieces to a headband; pieces made in this style are called fascinators.

Millinary is a specific process. It involves wetting and stretching material to the right shape to create a form, then adding wires and hand sewing. Carter pulls out a few hat blocks and a green hat with a decorative flower on it to demonstrate. It looks as if it’s a hat you might find at a department store, but, in actuality, he made it from a $1.99 placemat and a fabric flower he dyed with teabags. When he first started creating hats, he used whatever he could find. Most of the time he will use traditional fabric used in millinery: veiling, buckram, sinamay and crin.

Carter calls his pieces “hatinators” — they are part millinery crossed with details from fascinators.

He continues making his hatinators as costume pieces for Sarasota Ballet. For the 2011 piece he choreographed for the Theatre of Dreams program, “Holiday Overture,” he made the female dancers little militaristic garrison hats. For the “John Ringling Circus Nutcracker,” he made a jeweled “Great Gatsby”-Daisy-Buchanan-inspired headpiece for Mable Ringling.

His fans can’t get enough. Principal Dancer Kate Honea has a handful of hats she wears. Sarasota Ballet Board of Directors Chairwoman Hillary Steele had a few made for a party. A bunch of the female dancers wanted some to wear to a tea party. Carter’s making so many hats, he can’t keep up with all the supplies. He has a shipment of new material coming in, which he specially orders online.

“I wish I had some to show you, but I’m all out at the moment,” he says.

CONNECT 
To see Jamie Carter’s hats and creations, follow his Facebook page, Maverick & Milbank Co., his Instagram, JamieCarterSRQ, or email him at [email protected].