How to Make a Harry Potter Sorting Hat

If you want to do a different kind of Harry Potter costume, consider dressing as Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat. You can put aside your color-coded house robes and ties and don all brown robes and either wear or carry the Sorting Hat. When you wear the cosplay to conventions or events, you can offer to sort those around you into their houses — it’s like a nerdy party trick.

Instructables user Muggle Magic recently shared a Sorting Hat how-to that will help you with the process. They started by cutting the brim and cone parts of the hat from a cardboard and a paper bag, respectively. Then they covered the cardboard with cloth, which you can see in the above video:

Now drape the cloth over your hat again and align the face where it should be. Start hot-gluing the fabric to cover the cone of the hat first. You can leave this slightly loose, but make sure it maintains a cone shape. Trim off the excess but leave overlap where the cone meets the rim and also at the top of the cone so that the point of the hat can droop.

Hot-glue the extra fabric where the cone meets the rim, onto the rim of the hat. Now cut off random pieces of your leather fabric and hot-glue that to cover the entire top of the hat’s rim. Allow a few inches of fabric to extend beyond the rim of the hat. You’ll then want to fold the excess fabric around to the bottom of the hat’s rim and glue it down.

Read more at Instructables.