New Pattern: Louvre Beret

Hello All,

I’m thrilled to introduce a new pattern: a zero waste beret. It’s in Tauko magazine, which came out last week.

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about this pattern – this is the pattern I’ve been most happy to nail, ever.

There are seven sizes, to fit a 52-54-56-58-60-62-64cm head. So beret lovers with very large or small heads will, I hope, be able to make one.

The pattern is designed for woven fabrics such as linen, wool suiting, tweed, and denim, but can also be cut in low-stretch knits. It can be reversible, so you get two hats in one.

Here it is as shown in the magazine.

The white beret is wool and the orange one is linen.

The beret is cut from six triangular darted panels which tessellate to form a parallelogram.

These are arranged to make a six-gore hat and extra shaping comes from darts.

By adding an extra seam, the parallelogram can start as a rectangle, to give a zero waste layout.

The pattern can also be used as a conventional pattern piece and used to cut a beret from odd-shaped scraps or old clothes.

This pattern has a sewing guide on YouTube. The first four minutes has a show-and-tell of berets sewn in different fabrics.

How I came to make this pattern

I’d been pursuing a zero waste beret pattern off and on for the past 18 months. I tried all sorts of things: spiral shapes, circles in rectangles, triangles inserted into circles, and more. Then I happened to see that Tauko magazine was planning an architecture themed issue and I really wanted to be in it, as my late father was an architect and it was an underlying part of my childhood. (Children of architects may relate: family holidays involved going to Look at Buildings; my siblings and I had unlimited drawing paper, using the reverse side of old plans and specs Dad brought home from work; stuck for something to read? Always plenty of Architectural Digests, World of Interiors and Building Product News.)

I thought I would try the beret idea again and see if I could get it to work. I thought about triangles a lot, and played with a lot of paper shapes. Triangles are a very strong structural shape used all the time and are on many iconic buildings, not just the Louvre pyramid – the actual pyramids, the Eiffel tower, Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Flatiron building, geodesic domes and many, many more. The more I looked, the more I saw them. Then it clicked into place and the shape for the beret ended up being composed of triangles. So simple. Clearly I’d been overthinking it, but it’s all part of the process.

The architecture issue of Tauko is an excellent one, with interesting patterns and beautiful photography (my copy has yet to arrive at this far-flung antipodean outpost, but I’ve seen parts of it). The patterns are all available as standalone pdfs, and the Louvre Beret is here.

Cheers!