To Cap It All…

Let’s talk about hats…

Some of the Sherlock Funko Pops (the toys which appear in most of the Toylocked images) already have headgear – there is a Sherlock figure wearing a deerstalker hat, and a Moriarty wearing a crown. This wasn’t quite enough for Toylocked, so hats had to be improvised.  The first time I added a hat was simply because my daughter found a hat on an Innocent Smoothie bottle and noticed that it might fit on a Funko. I took advantage of a snowy day in December to send the toys outside to play snowballs. (By the way, if you look closely at this scene, you will see that I managed to position the toys between two sets of bird tracks in the snow, as if the two teams had walked to the spot!)

It then occurred to me that I could try to recreate the scene from The Empty Hearse where Sherlock and Mycroft attempt to outwit each other in a game of deductions around the hat left by the train enthusiast. I found another Innocent Smoothie hat on eBay, trailed round craft shops to find matching wool, and made the strings and bobbles needed to turn the hat into the Icelandic headgear in the scene. At the first attempt the strings were so long that they buckled; I love the way they still nearly reach the floor!

A more complicated hat to make was the bearskin worn by Sherlock in The Sign of Three, when he marches with the soldiers at the Wellington Barracks in London. I found the black fur material on eBay, took a piece of chain from an old necklace, and sewed it all together.  The chain wasn’t long enough to go right round his face, so the picture had to be taken from the side. The hat still didn’t quite work, being a bit floppy, so I had to fill the top with tissue paper. Funkos aren’t very stable at the best of times, because of their big heads. With the paper-filled hat on, Sherlock became very top-heavy:  even Blu-Tak on his feet didn’t stop him from falling over several times as I was taking the photographs.

I did finally get him to stand up for long enough to create the picture I wanted.

Making a pirate hat was relatively simple: two pieces of black card, stuck together at the sides, and a skull and crossbones cut out of white paper. I even made an eye-patch to go with them, on thin black elastic thread. The complication in this scene from The Final Problem was the setting. Sherlock being a pirate on a boat meant floating him on water (a kind neighbour’s goldfish pond, in fact). The wind caught the hat, Sherlock fell over, and the hat fell in the water. This doesn’t really show in the final photograph, but I eventually had to make another version of the hat for another scene (to be covered in a future blog). Meanwhile, here is Sherlock and a very tiny fisherman (who thankfully arrived with his own hat!).

The most complicated hat, and the one which caused the most swearing in the construction, was the security guard’s hat which Sherlock wears in The Great Game.

I spent a long time thinking this one through before I started making it. Funko heads are not round, but elliptical. The top is therefore a large oval of shiny black card. The brim is made of the same card, very carefully measured. The band round the head is made of black paper, and the soft part of the hat is black tissue. The band round the head is then bound together with black Japanese masking tape from an art supplies shop. Getting it all to work was very fiddly, but the hat did fit Sherlock at the end!

Incidentally, this picture contains quite a number of other technical details. The railings are made of black drinking straws stuck in plasticine, with tiny screw-in eyelets held in the top with more plasticine, and red embroidery silk as the rope. The frame is from a dolls-house supplier, and the picture of the Lost Vermeer from the episode is taken from the internet. The really geeky detail, though, is that if you could read the writing on the notice next to it, which I printed up in a tiny font, what it actually says is:

The Lost Vermeer

This really is a real painting by Vermeer and anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. We are hoping that lots of you will come in to see it and that one of you will then pay millions of pounds to buy it.

What we are not prepared for, of course, is for a smart-arse like Sherlock Holmes to notice that a supernova which appears in the night sky in the painting wasn’t actually visible in the time of Vermeer.

Of course that pesky security guard, Alex, noticed it, but we sorted him out pretty quickly. That’s what contract killers are for. Oh, and that professor who works at the Planetarium. Curses on them all.

Finally, the most ambitious hat of all, although it wasn’t quite as difficult as I’d expected. I wanted to portray Moriarty at the Tower of London, and to do that I needed a baseball cap as worn by tourists:

 (image from Sherlockology.com)

This was quite difficult to do, because there are quite a lot of panels which have to meet at the top, and the end result was not entirely symmetrical, but it more or less worked with a little tissue paper inside. I embroidered the flag and wording freehand. Then we had a walk around the Tower of London – I tried several angles with the Tower in the background, while bemused tourists watched me balance Jim on walls and bollards. In photos like this, if the toy is in focus the background will always be fuzzy, but I think it’s clear where it is!

At the end, I was left with a collection of hats which my Funkos still wear about the house. I think there may be some role-playing games going on that I’d rather not know about, but they let me bring them all together for a collective photo: