Witch Shop - Week Six

It's the last day of my giveaway, so be sure to enter now if you haven't already!  The winner will be drawn later in the week.

Do you remember the sideboard from last week that I was debating whether or not to use or to put a fireplace in the space instead?  Well, regardless of whether I do add a fireplace (and at the moment I'm thinking I will) the sideboard won't be going in the upstairs room.  That's because it now looks like this:

I transformed it into a shelving display unit for the shop downstairs by making a unit of shelves to sit on top of it.  The shelves are balsa wood while the more decorative front pieces of the shelves are cardboard.  The unit was finished by painting with a coat of a silvery metallic blue, a coat of crackle medium and then a coat of black which obligingly cracked to reveal the blue beneath.  I'm really pleased with how it turned out, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get a really good photo of it.  As of tomorrow it is officially winter in my part of the world and the sunlight, when we get it, has been pretty lousy.  Using a flash just doesn't show the detail of the cracked paint very well.

In the background of the photo you can see another unit for the shop.  This is just a cheap sideboard, the only change made to is was to paint it the same way as the shelves.  It was meant to be the shops hat display stand, but as you can tell from the two hats displayed on it I either need smaller hats, a larger stand or accept that the shop will have very few hats on offer.  The hats both on the stand and in the photo below were also made for the shop this week.

I don't know what the manufacturers treat the straw braid with, but it's addictive.  When I first used it to make floor mats, I kept going until I ran out of straw.  With hats it takes longer to run out of straw as they are more complicated and hence slower to make, but they are just as addictive as the mats were.  I'm especially proud of the tall, crooked two tone purple hat.  All four of these hats still need finishing with some trim, but I'll leave that until I've made a final decision which hat will be for sale in the shop and which will be being worn by the shops customers so I can be sure to accessorise the hat to match the outfit.  I have just one question about witches hats though . . . . When a hat is purchased it should be packed into a suitable hat box for the customer to carry home, but how do you make a hat box to fit a pointy witch hat?  I have a feeling the process will involve a lot of cursing.