My new favorite fashion item didn’t come in a shopping bag or from
one of those big brown trucks that frequently stop at my house.
It came packaged in a cool aluminum can, the kind that paint comes in, stuffed with comic book pages.
It’s a hat.
Not
just any hat. It’s a Creatadome, a one-of a kind, handmade, crocheted
hat made by Moye, a well-known photographer in the Qcity.
Moye has been a Charlotte photographer for 10 years and has shot photos of
R&B singer Anthony Hamilton and songstress Ledisi, to name a few.
Now, after years of building her brand, she felt a desire to do
something different.
“Everyone knows me for photographer,” she said. “But that’s not all that I am.”
I first learned that Moye was crocheting hats after she began dropping hints on her Facebook page.
Why hats? I finally asked her.
“I
needed a creative outlet,” she said. “Everybody gets in those burnout
stages, and I needed to do something else, first for me and to also
make other people aware of my other artistic capabilities.”
Taught
to crochet by her mother at age 11, Moye said she left it behind to
focus on other things. But her mother’s recent move back to Charlotte
sparked her desire to pick up her needle again. She said she finds
crocheting to be meditative and therapeutic.
Moye said it was
during a period of self-reflection that she began to think about the
potential every human has locked within. It was then, she said, that
the idea came to her to make hats. She compares this potential to the
secret powers possessed by comic book super heroes.
“It
symbolizes the power that we hold, individually and collective,” she
said. “Once we change our thought and our thought patterns, then we can
put that to use, and that changes the way we see life.”
She called her hat-making business “Creatadome,” and gave it the tagline, “Harness your super power.”
Moye
said she has made about 55 domes for clients during her first two
months in business, but she said she never forces herself to create.
Typically,
a hat can take her anywhere from four days to two weeks to make,
depending on size and style. She lets clients pick the colors they
like. Moye also makes matching scarves, called Wings.
She charges $35 to $85 for hats and $35 to $55 for wings.
For more information, visit her Web site at www.moyephoto.net
