10 Witch Hats for Halloween... Just Not Necessarily *This* Halloween

One improvement that I could easily make to my little hobby etsy shop is to anticipate seasonality.

Like, I'm literally the one who bitched every single year of my kid's Nutcracker years about why on earth the ballet department always acted like they had to reinvent the entire damn Nutcracker wheel every damn year. Y'all, you have done this thing before! Why is the children's dressing room never reserved and nobody has the elevator key and casting a dozen nine-year-olds in the same roles they held when they were eight takes three freaking weeks of daily emails saying that the casting will be out tomorrow? And yet here I am every year being all, "Oh, gorsh! Is Halloween month! Should I... make something Halloween for my etsy shop?" And then I have time to make maybe three things before Halloween is over.

Also me, sitting here on November 18 with nothing in my shop for Thanksgiving and nothing in my shop for Christmas

But you know what I DO have in my shop right now? The five handmade witch hats that I finished AFTER Halloween! The five that I managed to bust out before Halloween sold so quickly that I figured that this time I would get ahead of the game while I was thinking about it and my mind and my hands were already in witch hat mode.

I really like this hat that I fussy cut from a thrifted batik of the seven chakras:

I also got through quite a bit of previously thrifted formalwear for those pre-Halloween witch hats--

--as well as a successful experiment with facing a witch hat with burlap:

My big helper here just happened to be home for Fall Break right when I needed a witch hat model!

--but my absolute favorite hats, and the ones that I ended up making multiples of to get that jump on next Halloween, are these hats sewn from the last scraps of a vintage cutter quilt that I've had kicking around my fabric stash for over 15 years by now:

I'm a little sad to have used it all up with these hats, because I've never come across another old cutter quilt since, but I suppose that we mustn't hoard our resources, sigh.

It just sews up SO prettily!

These last four witch hats sewn from that vintage quilt are already listed in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, because who am I to tell you no if you want to buy one in the off-season--

--but what I really should do, and what I am firmly telling myself TO do, is to sew a couple more hats from unique fabrics every month, so that by the time next autumn rolls around I'll be fully stocked with seasonal items.

But not this week. This week my goal is to figure out how to sew re-usable fabric chains, probably with Velcro fasteners, because I think it would make a really cool--and eco-friendly! And heirloom!--holiday decoration. And obviously I won't figure that out and have any sets finished until it's past time to reasonably decorate for Christmas, sooo... I guess I'm really committed to getting a jump on next year's holiday products!

P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!