Preparing for 12th night!

Ok - I've been the busiest hatmaker I know. Here's a random brain-dump of various prep for my merchant booth at 12th Night.

First of all, I've learned a valuable Merchanting lesson: Book as much space as humanly possible, and do not assume that the MerchantCrat has any idea at all that no everything can be easily sold from behind a single table.  I booked an 8' space, assuming (again- my bad) that it would be like last year - an 8X8' space. It seems that instead, I have in fact reserved a single 8' table, and that's it.  Harumph. Ok - time to make lemonade. I've totally redesigned my selling concept, and have figured out how to get the 60 hats (largest number ever!) I hope to have ready, all on an 8" table and two elevated spinning racks.

Oh! Spinning racks of coolness!

Pleeze to be oohing and ahhing over my birfday prezzie:

Looks AWESOME, no? It holds 15 hats, which looks like it will be 12 flatcaps and three cav hats on the top rung. I LOVE the way it looks, and have figured out how to scrunch it into my table space, so will be ordering a second one for the rest of the flatcaps and cav hats. I'll have to hand them over the table, which isn't the way I've worked before, but hey, it's not the end of the world.

Anyway - ain't the rack awesome?

Also for my birthday, I got a beautiful box of Styrofoam heads. (yeah - I know. It's what I wanted :)

Aware that Styrofoam heads are not as classy looking as they might be, I spent some time this weekend covering a couple of them and padding the necks up to a reasonable size so that they will be able to wear some of the Renaissance Tailor's Bee-oo-tee-ful ruffs. Now, every other attempt I've seen to cover styro heads with fabric has resulted in something that reeks of bodies in a bag, so my expectations were low. I'm way more impressed with the results than I thought I'd be:

They also keep with the theme of "black store fixtures", so I'm extra pleased.

All in all - here's 80% of what's going to be for sale at 12th night:

And...AND! I and some real progress on my new French hoods that I've been going on about in previous posts. Here's the black linen coif - made just like all my white ones, but, you know, black:

and here is the actual "Hood" part, with billament strip and veil attached. (It's part of my new theory on these.)

I kinda threw my hair together alast night and tried it on, but I had respirator marks on my face, so you don't get any pictures of that. I need to adjust the braid placement a little, but it totally worked! I don't know if I'll have any of these in the shop this time, but it is really exciting and rare to come up with new projects that require Research and Development. That kind of time is really precious, so I'm thrilled to have made some progress.

Other than that - Got the white custom ordered Cav hat started, and it's in the shop drying - with a sign on it that says "Don't touch me till you wash your hands!!!" I've found the perfect blue trim, and have fabulous white feathers for it, and she'll be just gorgeous.

Also got WELL along with the Green custom ordered Cav hat. It's all wired and ready for the ribbon on the edge. I need to choose a hatband, but I've got a cornucopia of green feathers which I'm just salivating over. It's going to be a little non-standard, and totally made of awesome.

Found the best silver trim EVER for the purple one too. I've been saving it for something special, and this is definitely IT! Going to look ROYAL, that one.

OK - and that's entirely enough.