But after he puffs out the 2-foot high flames and sands away the singed fur particles to reveal one of the smartest-looking lids this side of the Mississippi, those misgivings are cast aside in favor of awe and wonderment.
“I’ll sand it and I’ll brush it and I’ll mist it with alcohol and actually light it on fire to get all those long guard hairs out,” the 55-year-old Harrison says of the felted hats. “Felting is a process, not a material. A lot of people don’t know that because they haven’t seen a shop that makes a hat from the raw body, and it’s kind of neat.”
Recently, a woman from the United Kingdom was staying as a guest at the Triple Creek Ranch in Darby. She walked into the Double H and let slip that she was a competitive musher, so Jimmy made her a hat that she wore during a portion of the Iditarod.
He even got President George W. Bush duded up in one of his custom jobs about five years ago, shipping a traditional cattleman’s hat directly to the White House. In return, he was mailed a picture of the president wearing the gift, which has an eagle and flag inlaid to the crown.
Despite some of his high-profile clientele, Harrison prefers making hats for local folks, and donates one to Miss Rodeo Montana every year.
“I’ve made hats for a lot of important people, but I’d much rather make a hat for somebody local, somebody who wants a custom-made hat, a durable hat that they can wear, and is going to appreciate getting exactly what they ask for,” he says. “Hats are a lot like boots and saddles. People want quality. They want them to last.”
In the workshop in back of his store, past the impressive showroom, there are about 50 pending orders hanging from pegs in the wall. Each hat is stuffed with a block of blue Styrofoam representing the exact size and shape of a given customer’s head. The name of the customer is written in marker on the styrofoam.
From the time a customer orders a Harrison hat, it takes about six weeks for the hat to reach its owner. Harrison figures he makes between 300 and 500 every year, spending about eight hours on each hat, but it all depends on the design specifics.
“I tell people I’ve done everything from 'Jesus Saves’ to oil rigs,”?Harrison says, pointing to photographs of hats bearing both designs.
He’s also done whip-stitched brims and elk tooth inlays. His wife wore a bedazzling hat to the Country Music Awards a couple years ago that was festooned with a stitched string of Swarovski crystals, and cost around $1,300.
Harrison learned the trade about 15 years ago and opened his Darby shop five years after that. He orders 100 percent beaver felted furs from a Tennessee felting factory, which arrive looking like droopy old sun hats that’ve spent too many afternoons on the garden scarecrow.
At the felting factory, the beaver fur is fed into a centrifugal cage and, like a cotton candy machine, the hair is wrapped around a copper cone in the middle.
“It’s born in a conical mat of fur, then it’s bleached and dyed and placed in another machine that grabs it and stretches it into a crown and brim,” Harrison said.
But then Harrison commences his handiwork, fitting the hats over the appropriately sized wooden block, then spinning and sanding the fur to the proper consistency. He wants only the beaver’s downy underhairs to remain in the hat, and setting flame to the hat eliminates any of the long guard hairs that weren’t removed during the felting process in Tennessee.
A leather sweat bandis then stitched into the hat, and Harrison starts shaping the brim using a Jiffy Steam machine. Starting with the same original shape, Harrison can make just about any hat style imaginable, from a replica of the cowboy hat John Wayne wore in “The Shootist” to an Italian fedora, a derby, a Homburg or even a Guatemalan fine palm leaf straw hat.
Harrison also offers his services in hat cleaning, blocking and total renovation. He has been shaping and cutting down hats since he was young man riding bulls in the rodeo with his friends, but only got serious about it after apprenticing under a female hat master in Dillon years ago.
“It’s something I’ve always had an interest in,” he said.
Because a person’s face shape is almost identical to the shape of his or her head, Harrison can suggest brim and crown styles to suit a particular customer at a mere glance.
When Heather Jackson, a horse trainer from Sula, stops by the Double H to admire a hat she’s been saving her pennies to buy, it fits like a dream.
“Jimmy just looked at my face and picked it off the shelf,” she said. “I’ve been in love with it ever since.”
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