What Is Hat Burning?

We call it “hat burning”

Burning design into wood or leather has been around for hundreds of years. If you include drawing designs on stone walls, the craft is thousands of years old. 

A design may depict a hunting trip, a celebration, a battle, or other significant event. Other drawings are artistic expressions created for personal amusement or to demonstrate a person’s artistic ability to others. The bottom line is people instinctively love to doodle and draw designs that are creative or meaningful.

Image by The Thrill Society From Pixabay

Hat burning today

The fancy name for burning designs into a medium like wood or leather is pyrography. A new version of pyrography is burning designs into hats. The designs are as simple as line drawings to complex designs with shading and torching to add depth to the image. Whatever the design, hats provide a good medium to express yourself. 

Design by Cool Moon Designs

How are designs “burned” into a hat?

Just about anything that can be heated until it is hot can be used to burn a hat. Some people even use small branding tools for repetitive designs. What is most common is either a soldering iron or traditional wood burning tools. We’ve found that a tool that has a variable heat adjustment is best. 

The system we use is a simple 3-step process that is perfect for beginners to experienced hat burners. 

Step 1. Once you’ve found a design that you like, print it. By cutting the design into a variety of shapes and designs, you can create a unique design without having artistic ability. Of course, if you are an artist, your own designs can easily be turned into a hat design. For most of us, having a traceable design is a great option.

Step 2.  Once you have your design the way you want it, you will trace the design onto the hat. The technique we use is simple. All you have to do is place a sheet of carbon paper between the hat and the design. Then you use a ballpoint pen or a stylus to “press” the design onto the hat.

Step 3. With the design on the hat, burn the design into the hat.

If you’ve never done hat burning before, here are a few suggestions.

Option 1. Buy a sheet of stiffened felt or similar material from a craft or fabric store. Practice burning the material until you feel comfortable using the tools you own and setting temperatures (if you have a temperature adjustment). Obviously, ruining a piece of material over burning a hole in a hat is a much better and cheaper choice.

Option 2. Buy an inexpensive hat from a store or from an on-line retailer (or use an old hat that you no longer want or use). This is a good way to get used to burning on the crown of the hat versus the brim. You can also use the hat to practice “torching” the hat. 

Once you are comfortable burning on disposable material, you can begin burning your hat. With a little practice, you can add shading techniques and torching to create a spectacular design on a hat.

Design by Cool Moon Designs

Conclusion:

Our designs are an excellent way to get started hat burning. We have designs that range from simple to complex. And if you like parts of one design and parts of another design, you can cut them apart to create a design all your own.

Out of our thousands of customers, we have people who enjoy burning hats for their own or family use. While others use our designs to create unique hats that they sell, often for more than $100 dollars. 

This article is not intended to be an in-depth training session on hat burning. But we hope it gives you the information you need to get started in this fun and rewarding craft..

Happy burning!