Millinery Monday: Straw Ornaments

This Millinery Monday, I share some of the original straw ornaments or straw motifs in my display collection. These pieces date to the early 20th century from Italy. The designs range from those found on millinery pieces from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Each are made with straw, whole or split, and straw threads. Thes motifs or ornaments would be used to embellish hats and bonnets. Some, similar and often much smaller ornaments were worked directly on the woven or lace-work straw bonnet or hat.

My goal or hope is to develope the skill to recreate some of these well enough to do them justice. Creating these motifs is a type of straw skill that takes years, or even decades to develop.

If you look closely at the materials in antique straw ornaments, you discover just how much the length of straw has changed. The wheat and rye cultivated for the millinery industry produced shafts that were quite long between the elbows. If you walk a modern day wheat field, you know the wheat has been engineered to be much shorter with larger heads for grain production.