How I made The Sorting Hat

When you purchase an old witch's hat from a car boot sale, there really is only one thing to recycle it into!

I have to confess, I've had the hat on my to-do list for about 2 years!  Because it was already a hat, I really wasn't sure how I was going to make this.  So I left it until I found the right fabric.

The exact fabric I wanted never happened.  I wanted old thin leather really, something that would look weathered and worn, but that sort of fabric was quite expensive in the charity shops and so I bought a thin poly-cotton brown jacket instead!

I used some craft felt to mould the face on the hat, I wanted to be able to move and mould the fabric over it.  I didn't want it tight over the face.

At this point, I wasn't sure how on earth I was going to wrap the new fabric around the hat. So I took it apart!  The rim was rather easy to re-cover.  I surprised myself!

For the face, I cut the cone shape up the back to make it flat and covered the face with fabric.

I tacked the eyebrows and mouth to keep the fabric in place, sort of!  Then sewed the fabric onto the original hat and put the cone back into shape.  Was a bit of a fiddle but I got there.

He now sits pride of place on my dressmaker's dummy and although it's not too clear in these pictures you can make out his face in the flesh as it were.  A great prop for any Harry Potter fan.