How To Make a Bush Hat

The leather flying hat that I have is hot and provides no protection from the sun so I'm going to make a straw hat out of one of these pandanus palms. There's little spikes on them so you want to have gloves, leather flying gloves are perfect. To start with I want a nice big front like this and I want to just cut off the spikes and I just run the knife along take off the first few millimeters all the way back. Same on the other side, cut it off, get rid of those spines because that's going to hurt when you stick it on your noggin, shape it to your head. So that's the basis and here's one I prepared earlier and I'll actually put the two together and that will start basically the frame of the hat and I've temporarily tied them together and it's the size of my head and this is my pile of pandanus fronds which I'll now thread between them to make the second stage. I'm just sliding pairs of fronds through that hat structure and then I'm just tying them on with just a little bit of stuff that I've ripped off the side. I've gone all the way around and you want to make sure you have an even number when you do this otherwise it just ends up being slightly out when you finish up but now it's time to flatten it out. All right now's the first time it's starting to look anything like a hat and this is why I doubled up the fronds because they can split apart now and fill out those gaps. Too far to go now just the last little one around the rim. All right and there you go there's a straw hat. It looks a little bit like a stingray to me. I always keep this little back piece on here like that because I find whenever I have a straw hat the place that I pick it up in always breaks so it's nice having something sturdy like that to grab it on. Pretty broad brimmed. A couple of little gaps I might fix them later. Main thing is you want to make sure these things are set and finished in one go because they dry out and then once they dry out they'll stay in that position forever. She's pretty comfy up under here plenty of shade. It's a pretty heavy hat but when the moisture dries out of it that'll take a lot of the weight out of it and it's a hell of a lot better than a flying hat or nothing and it's really really difficult to try and get by in northern Australia without a decent broad brimmed hat. If you'd like to see more clips like this from my month-long solo survival expedition in the Kimberley Outback click on my photo bottom left and watch the trailer for my upcoming expedition movie.