We’re a little over a month out from the Virginia Gold Cup fall races, so tailgate planning is in full force at home (our tailgate from last year). I’ve been looking back at a few of our horse race photos and was reminded of something we used to do religiously: decorate hats for the races.

I’m not sure if it’s just a southern thing, or if some of my northern, midwestern, and readers from everywhere else have done this, too. Let me know in the comments if you have – I’m so curious! We used to decorate our hats before horse races – from Carolina Cup to Gold Cup, Foxfield, and everything in between.

Of course, the Kentucky Derby has, in my opinion, the very best hats. It’s a goal of so many horse race attendees to have theirs stacked high and decorated to the nines. You can buy them beautifully decorated already, with loops, flowers, and intricate details – and you can easily spend several hundred.

We decorated ours primarily with ribbons. Once you had your dress picked out, you had to figure out your ribbon color scheme. You didn’t want it to match too closely and you had to be able to layer them, so you needed a few different widths. Of course, thicker wired ribbon was a must for the proper big bow. If you can find one smaller to layer on top of the bow loops, that was a bonus.

I remember sitting on the floor with my college roommate, Laine, after a trip to no fewer than four craft stores with spools of ribbons in colors to match our dresses. The whole process of finding hats with ribbons or decor that you could easily remove without damaging the hat itself could be an ordeal. I ordered several online and almost always had good luck at Saks Off 5th stores.

We’ve since graduated from ribbons to feathers (like mine from last year’s Gold Cup) and hats already decorated with beautiful details, but I’ll always have a soft spot for those Saturday mornings fighting the glue gun webs and securing ribbon frays!

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