Frisco – In the not so far reaches of Frisco, you’ll find a quiet street in your typical North Texas neighborhood. At one of those homes, Elizabeth Brady quietly works away at her art, while dodging smoke from her searing sketching. “I’ve always been artsy, I mean, but I have drawn and done a few things like that, but not at this level,” said Elizabeth.
Elizabeth owns the Burned Hat Co., a business she started in 2023 after discovering she had a knack for burning designs into the brims of colorful cowboy hats. “I love putting the tool to the hat and watching it burn and making the design in the hat is so gratifying to me,” said Elizabeth.
Elizabeth moved to Texas in 1989 and had a career in cosmetics when one day, everything changed. “So two and a half years ago, I was in a car accident,” said Elizabeth. “I had a young girl, 16 years old and had her driver’s license for two weeks, and she was busy on her phone and she hit me at about 45 miles an hour when I was almost at a stop in my car. Resulted in numerous herniated vertebrae and broken ribs and concussion that lasted for over seven months and still to this day still have concussion issues. If you have a concussion, anybody will tell you sound, lights, certain things just don’t do good when you’re around it. And so one of the things that the neurologist recommended was trying to find something I could kind of focus on, and that’s how Burned Hat Co. started. I started burning the hats, and I just never stopped.”
Carefully creating her designs, Elizabeth hand draws everything on her hats. “I don’t trace,” explained Elizabeth. “I just sit down with a hat and whatever comes out, comes out. I don’t really think about it. So sometimes you’ll see the same kind of design, but it’ll be a little bit different because I normally never do two hats the same.”
This painstaking work has worked miracles for Elizabeth’s recovery. “To this day, it’s like a form of therapy for me,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll sit down. Sometimes I’ll start burning at six in the morning and it’ll look up, and we’ll have burned all day long and it will feel like I just sat down. So for me, it’s a therapy. I’ve come a long way, long, long way. For the first seven months, I didn’t drive. It was difficult to walk. It was difficult to do a lot. So my son moved back in because I needed help. So it’s been a road. It’s been a road.”
The detail in Elizabeth’s work almost seems to come naturally as she progresses through a piece. “And what I do when I’m burning them is I’ll start with an initial burn, and you’ll see where it gets lighter here,” said Elizabeth. “So what’s happening is the hat’s almost, I don’t know the proper word for it, but they’ll get lighter. This is me losing my train of thought. What’s the word?”
While working on the art alleviates some of the pain and anxiety from the accident, Elizabeth still has moments where things don’t connect. “A lot of memory issues,” explained Elizabeth. “I can easily forget people. Don’t mean to. Forget names. Forget my address. My son, I’m constantly saying to him, ‘I know I’ve asked you this, but let me ask you one more time.’ And he’s good about it. He knows. He’ll be like, ‘I told you that already, mom, like 10 minutes ago. You already asked me that.’ ‘Oh, okay.’”
Despite her cognitive conundrum, creating has created an outlet that’s more than just something to do, it’s actually turned into a big business. “I can honestly say if I hadn’t gotten into a car accident and gotten brain damage, I would not have started burning,” said Elizabeth. “It’s like a superpower. Yeah, and it’s amazing because even though the accidents been so long, a lot of the concussion is still… A lot of the effects are still there. They just never cleared up. And so it really calms me. It just really makes me, when I’m focused on it’s really gratifying. Makes me feel better. I kind of found where I needed to land in a tragic way, but I found where I need to be. It’s such a good outlet. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.”
When you can get an amazing hat with an amazing story, it just feels different than anything you’d pull off of a rack. “One of the things I always do too, that a lot of people don’t is I always burn the bottom,” said Elizabeth. “Because when you’re wearing a hat, then you see it and then I always sign each piece.”
So if you’re in the market for a special piece of headwear that doubles as a work of art, look no further than this stop on The Texas Bucket List. “I think every single hat in here has a little bit of me in it because I put a lot of love into them,” said Elizabeth. “I really want people when they get them to realize that there was a lot of time put into them. The ones I do, I’m going to make sure the best ones I make and people really get something special that they can enjoy. That’s really important to me.”