Knitted Winter Hats - Viking Hats, Spartan Hats and Valkrie Hats || Short Army

First order of business: September 15 2011 | Thursday at 08:15 PM

Sometime in September of 2008, before I had a concrete direction of where I was going with my various creative endeavors (not that I'm all that sure where I'm going now), I organized a photo-shoot - with help from my incredibly skilled freinds JJ and Anthony - of the children's apparel I had made. Among the many pieces Anthony photographed for me that day, was an experimental hat... it looked like this:

This was actually the second version. The first I made in college and had turned out so misshapen that I had given up on the idea of this hat for several years. Once I made this red one, though, other versions followed. This hat has a few awesome things going for it.

1. The front sits high on the forehead which is great for me and my often brightly-colored bangs.

2. The earflaps rock! New England winters don't stand a chance.

3. The squared off top makes it look like you have little ears, and that's just adorable no matter how old you are.

The only thing this hat has going against it is that it's not going to be a big hit with the gents. Thankfully I have all these other hats to compensate. Anyway, I had made a small stack of these a couple of years ago for a craft fair that ended up having no attendees, and sold none. I sat on these hats for a while, selling a few here and there to friends or the occasional half-dozen to stores that appreciate hand-made products, and had all but forgotten them until the very last day of Anime Boston last spring. Since the last day tends to be the slowest, I was digging through one of my old show boxes for inspiration when I found 6 of these in various colors. I put one on my head, and stacked the other five neatly on our table. I sold them all in five minutes! Such a nice reception for a design I had totally given up on.

I'm expecting to carry this hat in a sweet yellow and a robin's egg blue by this winter. Here's one of my wonderful people at the factory modeling a sample (not in the correct color, of course):