Whimsical Brims

Alright, so today’s the post where I tell everyone what I’ve been doing for the last 6 months straight.  So you remember the post about mannequin heads?  Well I have literally become the mad hatter.  Well I’ve become a hatter, I was always mad.  Here’s the story.

After you have been at my company for 7 years they give you an 8 week paid vacation called sabbatical.  This vacation is on top of your regular vacation and must be taken all at once.  Since I started working I’ve been joking that I was going to take my sabbatical and work at King Richard’s Faire (the local renaissance festival).  Well it was still a joke until I came up on my sabbatical this year.  I’m not an actor, but I always said I could make hats and sell them.  So I emailed the faire asking if they had room for more artisans.  They had one booth left, so for kicks I put together some prototype patterns, made some hats and sent pictures in.  Then they juried me in as a new artisan for the season under my newly established name Whimsical Brims.

From there I have been scrambling to learn business and tax laws and make hats.  Oh and then retrofit the booth they gave me (did I mention it is 16’x8′ wide??)  Luckily I have such supportive and amazing friends and family.  My best pal Amy made me an amazing sign out of pallet wood, made all my hat stands, two chandeliers and also collected a bunch of furniture for me to put in the booth.  My mom has scoured thrift stores and yard sales to find me items for my stop, including furniture and rugs, and has taking on the laborious task of cutting out my hats.  I could not have gotten here without either of them.

Last Friday Will & I took the day off of work from our “normal” jobs to set the shop up.  Here’s the transformation.

Before

Now

And here are all the hats I will be selling (by the way almost everyone I polled about the mannequin head transformation hated it, so I have to redo those).

The Marian

The Gwenevere

The Muffin

The Jester

The Henry

The Boleyn

The Robin

The Shakespeare

Next weekend is the first weekend of the faire and my aim was to have completed 200 hats by the start.  I finally hit that goal last night!  As for sabbatical… well that didn’t exactly work out.  My plan was to work at the faire on weekends and spend the week replenishing my supply while on sabbatical, but they pushed my sabbatical out 3 weeks.  So the beginning of the faire I’m going to focus on not selling out…  And now that my sabbatical is almost here, I keep getting questions about what I’m doing.  Most people take long vacations to somewhere exotic.  When I tell people I’m selling hats at King Richard’s Faire most people stare at me blankly or say “oh”.  I guess I should start trying to hide the fact that I really have gone mad.