Jun 8, 2025
Hello, I am a red wizard, I sold some hats today. (And a board game.)
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Hello, I am a red wizard, I sold some hats today. (And a board game.)
Some lovely worldcon friends sent me a picture of me, very fortunately since I didn't remember to get any good ones myself! This was the second formal outing of both the hat and the staff, and the first outing of my cloak and hood that I made myself!! Don't remember why my right arm was behind my back like that, was probably in the middle of a sandwich or something. Have I shown off my staff here already yet? It was really fun to make!!
Apparently I've decided to take up sewing! Apologies for the lack of hat in this post, but it is still in aid of my wizardly ventures! I'm making myself a summer cloak, out of some nice heavy linen. Much lighter than the tweed cloak a friend made me. This linen half-circle cloak is the first proper sewing project I've ever attempted, and I am quite pleased with it!!
cat hat!!!!
Behold! This hat will get felted soon, but here it is just as I have finished knitting it this evening! I shall update with the finished piece later. This hat was knitted to David Attenborough's Life of Mammals series, so hopefully whoever goes on to wear it shall be blessed with special wisdom in the area of mammal behavioural studies.
I don't like the concept of money, never have. I wish I could just make my hats and give them away, but I have to spend money on making them, and I am far from being financially secure. Occasionally I'll get people asking "omg can I buy a hat!" and they're mostly crestfallen to discover that my "fair price" for a hat is higher than about £20. £20 buys you the top 10cm of a wizard hat, I'm afraid.
But even for a hat that isn't a full wizard hat, maybe just a short cone with no brim:
like so, at my fastest I can knit that in four hours flat, no breaks. So, four hours, £20 per hour, that's an £80 hat before I've even felted it.
But it's occurred to me recently, even if I can do that in one day, I cannot then do another hat straight away, because that's exhausting, and I'm not going to be able to do much else either after concentrating so hard for four hours, so really that's a full day's work right there. So really, that should be £160 by my freelance rate, for the knitting and the felting and then the stretching and ironing and the lost time to being worn out.
In the above picture this is the hat felted and moulded into the correct shape, but I do not currently have an ironing board so I skipped making it smooth and even.
I haven't yet managed to knit a full wizard hat in one day in order to compare, but at the moment I don't think I could do it in one day, so we're probably talking £200+ for one of the more wizardy cones.
Does this seem like a reasonable price to anyone? One thing to remember is that I've made these to be as sturdy as possible, so ideally they'd last you a lifetime, so good value for money in the long run, hopefully!!
Hey guys, I found this creature, anyone able to identify it?
Just kidding, this is my Goblin Hat!! Out of all my hats, this one I think looks most like it's the home of some fantastical woollen hermit crab that's going to scuttle away at any moment. If a wizard is a kind of Creature, then a good wizard hat should also be Some Kind of Creature.
Heyyyyy look, what's this, six hats???? No! it's going to be just one hat!! Watch this space, I'm very excited about this hat!!