When we first arrived in Berlin on Monday and were exploring the neighborhood around our hotel, Jeremy and I came across a snazzy little hat shop. It was closed at the time, but I vowed that I would go back at some point and look around since hats are one of my Favorite Things in the Whole World Ever.

Today I finally got my chance. I went for a late breakfast in the little café where Jeremy and I had cake and coffee on our first afternoon in the city, and on my way back to the hotel I swung by the hat shop. And I almost, almost didn’t even go in because…well, it’s a really tiny shop, and I hate that sensation you sometimes get when you’re the only customer in a really tiny shop and you feel like you’re being scrutinized. So I walked by, glanced in and saw the proprietress and no one else, and then hemmed and hawed outside before telling myself to stop being so stupid and self-conscious and just go in and look at the damn hats.

So I did—and wouldn’t you know, I had a great time trying on loads of different hats and chatting with the extremely nice milliner. I kept coming back to a really cute little felt cloche hat with a tiny zipper on the brim at the back, but I wasn’t crazy about the color and it was a bit too small for my big head. But then the milliner said she could make pretty much any hat I wanted, and she brought out a book full of samples of felt in all different colors, and suddenly I found myself ordering a personalized cloche hat in a lovely burgundy felt with a cheeky contrasting green zip at the back.

To top it all off, when I told her that I was leaving for England the next day and asked if she could send the hat on, she said that since she actually had the felt in the shop, she would start making the hat right away so that I could pick it up before leaving Berlin tomorrow. So I’ll swing by the shop tomorrow in the early afternoon, and hopefully I’ll be leaving Berlin with my own pretty, customized, felt, waterproof, crushable, 1920s-style cloche hat. How cool is that? Yay, milliners! Yay, hats!

Further reading…