Leather witch and wizard hats

 My husband and I wanted unique hats to wear for cons. He specifically wanted a leather Rincewind hat from the TV miniseries The Color of Magic.  I had already made him the robe but he wanted a new hat.  

Rincwind and Twoflower 

I found a really neat leather hat pattern from LeatherHub patterns on etsy. This pattern has the strangest looking shapes! Based on the recommendations in the pattern, I used a thin veg tan leather for the base.  Once the pieces were all cut they had to be punched.  There were so many tiny holes, the punching took significantly longer than the cutting. Once cut and punched, I dyed the leather red and left it to dry for a couple of days.

Wizard hat, cut and punched

Wizard hat, dyed red

LeatherHub patterns has videos to compliment their patterns, which makes it super easy to understand how they go together.  The pattern pieces fit perfectly and it went together very easily. I stitched it together with red waxed artificial sinew.

Wizard hat undecorated

Once it was finished it needed the word "Wizzard" and a bunch of stars.  The text description in the book states some of the stars were falling off, so I did not glue all the corners on all the stars. It also states that the large star on Rincewind's hat is a 7-pointed star, so although the TV show used 5, I went with 7 points on the central star. The stars and letters are cut of a gold patterned leather and glued with leather glue.

Wizzard hat

 

I also made a witch's hat for me using a different LeatherHub pattern, which went together just as easily!  For my hat, I dyed it blue, but wanted it to look older, so I underdyed it with some black in streaks first.  I then covered the hat with rhinestones before stitching it together. The rhinestones are essentially 2 part snap together rhinestones for leather work that I bought in bulk mixed colors. This makes the hat a bit heavy but really fun to wear.  

Leather witch's hat

I am really finding leatherwork a lot of fun right now and am loving some of the great patterns I am finding online to try out.

Tentacle fan and parasol: quick accessories

 One thing I find I need most at steampunk events is a fan, as the rooms can be very hot. The second most common thing I need is a parasol, since many of our local events involve being outside.  So I wanted a matching fan and parasol that would be quick and easy to make, not too expensive and easily replaceable when lost or damaged. So I decided to decorate cheap premade bamboo and fabric fan and parasol with silver and black sharpy. 

The sharpy worked pretty well on the fabric surfaces and made a really quick way to decorate a fan and parasol.  I was worried these would still be a little plain, so I decided to make a new handle for the parasol, a new topper for the parasol and a decoration for a fan tassel.  Keeping with the theme, I used some epoxy sculpt to make some tentacle pieces. I had some brown epoxy sculpt that I figured would make a good base for copper coloring later. I have never worked with epoxy sculpt before and it is really sticky.  It also took longer than I expected to get to the stage where it would hold detail.  I had to work up the material and then let it sit for a while before molding details. This was very frustrating as I did all the detail to start with and had to redo it after the material set up a bit!

Once dry however, it took rub-n-buff really well to make a nice copper looking set of decorations.

It was really easy to glue the new handle and topper to the parasol, and I think they make the parasol a bit more unique.  

Final details for the fan and parasol was adding a little trim.  For the fan, I quickly whip stitched on some black lace and for the parasol, I added some black and silver fringe.  These both came from my stash and made a great use of some scrap trim I had laying around. When I sculpted the smaller tentacle above, I used a straw to make a hole so the tentacle could be threaded on a ribbon to add to the fan handle.   

These items were pretty quick to make and get a surprising amount of use!  I am always in need of a fan or a parasol and since these were relatively cheap, I dont worry too much about losing them or breaking them.