Make the Sorting Hat Smarter with this DIY Harry Potter Costume Accessory

If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you know what the Sorting Hat does—it looks into your head and decides which house of Hogwarts you belong in. But what does it look like when the Sorting Hat is “thinking” about where to place each new student? Well, this DIY Harry Potter costume accessory will show you.

This tutorial will show you how to make your own Sorting Hat that can flash any color of the rainbow on a whim, using Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express and Microsoft MakeCode—the easy drag-and-drop programming interface we use here at Adafruit.

In addition to the Circuit Playground Express, you’ll also need a battery holder and batteries to power it. The hat I’m using is one I found at Target but Amazon has lots of them too. It’s important that your Halloween hat has a wide brim so there’s room for all the electronics!

Once your Circuit Playground Express is all set up, programming it is almost as simple as putting on your hat! Open MakeCode and add the FastLED extension from the Advanced tab along the left edge of the screen. Drag out an array (under Variables) and call it “colors.” This is where we’ll define each color we

Harry Potter costume ideas are always a popular choice for halloween or themed parties and cosplay events. I’ve made numerous DIY Harry Potter costumes in the past, and this year is no exception!

If you’re looking for an easy Harry Potter costume, you can’t go wrong with a Hogwarts School robe. However, if you want to go one step beyond the basic Hogwarts uniform and make your own sorting hat costume, read on!

In this step-by-step tutorial I’ll show you how to make your own DIY sorting hat headband accessory that can be worn with any black cloak. It’s a fun and easy way to take your wizarding world costume to the next level.**

As you may know, my family loves Harry Potter. I was very excited to find out that the new Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios had a Sorting Hat for visitors to wear. I decided that would make the perfect Halloween costume for my son.

I wanted to add a little something extra to our sorting hat, so I decided to make it interactive. After a trip to the local craft store, some time on Instructables and a few nights of tinkering, I came up with this interactive sorting hat accessory.

This is the perfect project for any Harry Potter fan and only requires basic skills with a sewing machine and electronics!

I made this Sorting Hat for my Harry Potter-loving toddler to wear for Halloween. It was surprisingly easy and it makes a great accessory for any homemade costumes, whether or not you want to go as a Harry Potter character. I even think it could work with a cute little witch costume or something like that.

The Sorting Hat is fun to play with too – it talks and sings the song from the first movie! You can make the hat however you like and use any pattern you want. I made mine out of fleece and soft padding, but you can use whatever fabric you have on hand.

This project is pretty simple and requires no special skills or tools. The only thing that might be slightly tricky is figuring out how to add the electronics, but everything you need to know is in this tutorial.

When I made my own Sorting Hat, I didn’t want to simply say “Oh, it’s magic” – I wanted it to actually be magic! To do this, I decided to hook up the hat with an Arduino board and a computer. The computer would decide which house to assign me to, and have the Arduino board tell the hat to light up. The hat has three LEDs in it – red for Gryffindor, blue for Ravenclaw, and green for Slytherin.

To make this Sorting Hat costume accessory even cooler, I also hooked up a button that allowed me to switch between different houses and get sorted into another one. That way people could take turns sorting each other at parties!

The first step is making the hat. If you don’t want to sew your own hat (I don’t blame you), you can buy one here. The rest of this tutorial assumes you are using a DIY Sorting Hat like mine.

It’s that time of year again. Halloween is coming and the DIY costumes are out in force. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you might be thinking of dressing up as one of your favorite characters. But how to choose which one? Sure, you could dress up as Harry, Hermione or Ron (or even Albus Dumbledore!), but there’s something to be said for wearing the Sorting Hat itself instead. After all, it’s the Sorting Hat that decides who goes where at Hogwarts—it has all the power! And this year, thanks to Make: Projects member [mixedupmuppet](http://www.instructables.com/member/mixedupmuppet), you can make yourself a Sorting Hat costume accessory that will actually sort things for you!

[mixedupmuppet](http://www.instructables.com/member/mixedupmuppet) made his hat using an Adafruit [Circuit Playground board](https://adafru.it/dMn). The Circuit Playground is a programmable microcontroller that has a lot of onboard sensors and actuators—this means it doesn’t have to be connected to other components in order to do stuff. In this instance,

I’ve seen a few DIY Sorting Hat tutorials out there, but I wanted to make one that had a little more character. The hat is made of a gray hooded sweatshirt and felt.

I am making this tutorial with the assumption that you are using a hooded sweatshirt as the base. I would recommend going to a thrift store and finding an old one (or if you have one that you don’t wear anymore it will work just fine) and cutting it up for this project.

Start by cutting off the sleeves of the Hoodie, cutting off the bottom band, and pulling out all of the strings from each hole.

Cut out two pieces of felt in the shape of your hand (finger tips included) and use those as patterns to cut out two more pieces from a different color felt (I used black). Sew them together by hand or with a sewing machine along the sides leaving an opening at the wrist.

Turn the sleeve inside out and stuff it with batting/stuffing until it is full enough that it can stand up on its own (see picture above). Sew or glue shut the opening in the wrist; add in any additional stuffing if necessary to make sure the sleeve is full and standing straight up on its

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