EL PASO COUNTY — For El Paso County resident Brenda Quiñones, the road towards discovering her artistic flair has been lined with hundreds of hats and defined by their decades of stories.
Brenda owns and operates St. Clement Custom Hats and spends her days crafting and restoring fur felt hats, "Some people wear fedoras, some people wear western styles, and I can make all of those hats."
All of those and more besides.
"Id say I've made over a hundred new hats. and I've repaired and restored twice that."
Brenda describes the journey towards this vocation as an unexpected one, having spent her professional career in a more corporate environment.
"After 40 years of professional environments and regulatory affairs and offices and fluorescent lights," commented Brenda, "you know, it's so rewarding to be able to make a living off of being an artist; I never thought that was possible."
The connective thread between then and now is likely her small herd of alpacas she cares for on her property east of Colorado Springs.
"Well, when you get a herd of alpacas, what are you going to do? You shear them and use their fiber."
So, for many years, she's been processing, carding, spinning, weaving, and selling alpaca fiber products, "...I wanted a different niche though," she commented.
About six years back, her husband found that niche from an article in the Gazette on Tom Hirt, a professional hat maker who's made plenty of hats for famous movies over the decades; within that article, Brenda learned about Hirt's twice-yearly class at Trinidad State College, "So I said, I want to try that."
And so, she did.
Brenda's first two hats were for her and her husband, "...and from that point forward, I was hooked."
She explains that the years of experience in working with alpaca fiber prepared her for the transition to working with the fur felt she's now using to construct her wide variety of custom headware.
She continued to learn more, practice more, and began assembling all the requisite supplies and equipment; soon her family and friends started asking for their own hats and hat repairs.
Eventually, through word of mouth, new customers started to call asking for restorations and new custom-makes, "So, it just picked up and snowballed from there and I just got more and more requests."
Finally, in 2023, she officially launched her business.
When she first launched, she was still working a full-time job as a human-resources manager, adding her hat-making endeavors as an additional part-time job; however, overtime her new, artistic pursuit was able to become her full-time (and now, only) job.
"And now it's to the point," commented Brenda, "where I'm falling asleep at night, thinking about the hats that I want to work on in the morning."
She says her work queue is now consistently about two months out; when she's able to start work on a new hat, it takes between 5 to 10 days to complete, while a hat restoration is harder to predict due to the variety of conditions in which they arrive.
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One thing she loves about her chosen occupation, is the stories; Brenda says that new hats often denote an upcoming chapter in someone's life, while restorations can come packed with decades of experiences, "Every customer hands it to me with a story."
"Yeah, it's definitely very intimidating when someone hands you their 50-year-old hat that needs repair and says, 'I've had this hat since my grandparents gave it to me when I was 16, I'm taking this hat with me to my grave, I need you to make it perfect.'"
However, when the job is done, "The look on their face when I give it back to them, it's like getting a member of the family back for them."
Each time she works to continue one of these stories, she also adds to her own story.
"My kids are artists, we have a lot of artists in the family," said Brenda, "and people would ask me, 'aren't you an artist? Where did the kids get their skills from and their talents from?' And I would say, 'I don't know if I'm an artist, because I work all the time,' and now I'm discovering the artist inside."
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Brenda constructs each of her hats from beaver, nutria, or rabbit fur felt.
She says that she also still finds time to work with alpaca fiber, but that it occupies her "hobby time" now.
If you would like to learn more about St. Clement Custom Hats or check out Brenda's ongoing projects, click here.
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