Background:

My friend Scott Gipson is an incredibly talented artist in many mediums. Since 2008 he has been using his great grandfather's 100+ year old lathe to shape salvaged local wood into magical wands, under the shop name of GipsonWands. I am honored to play the enthusiastic role of "Wand Shop Girl" anytime GipsonWands has an event booth or table. 

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When we are selling wands & other wizarding world related items, we like to cosplay. One of the greatest things about cosplaying in the wizarding world, is that you can either cosplay as a character from that world, OR you can cosplay as yourself inserted into that world. We both choose to cosplay as ourselves in the wizarding world.

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While in cosplay, a common get-to-know-you question is, "Which house are you in?" This generally is in reference to the houses of the british Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, & more recently to the houses of the American wizarding school in the Boston area, Ilvermorny. Since Scott & I are cosplaying that we personally are a wizard & witch, we weren't ever really comfortable with our backstories being that our Missourian parents would send us as kids to the east coast for boarding school & it is especially crazy to imagine that either of our parents would have been excited to send either of us to a different continent while in grade school. Scott and I got tired of waiting for a school in the wizarding world to be told about being located in the middle of North America (a much more reasonable distance to send a Missouri kid), and in response to that awkwardness we felt everytime we claimed a Hogwarts or Ilvermorny house...we created Broulard School of Magic!