The next interesting part of the ensemble was to make the headdress. My beloved burlesquedancer Lady Effulgent had contacts that could help us get access to a lasercutter and also teach me how to make my patterns for it and use it. Very exciting!
We started out making a rough pattern for the headdress, so it sat in the right position on the head. An interesting note here is, that the perspective of the viewer is very important here! I started out sculpting the headdress while Lady E was sitting, but the silouette was all wrong when she stood up. We then realised that we needed to check everything while she was wearing her showheels, in order to know just how it all would look.
Next step was to design the snowflake pattern on each of the peaks. I looked at a lot of different snowflakes on google, and this is what I ended up with. It was a very rough sketch, but it was enough to go by and after it got scanned I had something to work with at the lasercutting center.
At the center I learned to clean up my sketch and turn it into a vector pattern using CorelDraw. This was really fun, as I originally started out playing with this program when I was 13 (I used Corel Photopaint for 5-7 years before I switched to Adobe Photoshop for my drawings).
Using this vector we first tested the pattern on cardboard, and then when we were happy with it, cut it out in 3 mm filt. The filt is flexible but solid enough to make the self-supporting snowflake pattern. It should handle accidental crushing better than a stiff material, and still be able to carry the weight of the rhinestones.
To asssemble the headdress, I glued the peaks together and onto a thin layer of filt. I planned to use a gluegun, but unfortunately did not have time to buy one. Instead I used wood-glue, something I rather regret now:
First off, I tried to brighten the cream white of the filt with clothpaint. In order to quicken the drying process, I put the whole piece in the oven at 75 celcius. The woodglue did not take kindly to that. It turned an horrible shade of burnt orange, that clashed with the white and blue colortheme.
Secondly, when I started to move the headpiece around to work on it, I realised the woodglue did not keep it together very well, and I had to re-glue most of the areas.
All in all a very good reason to buy that gluegun:/
Rhinestoning the headpiece was pretty much the same story as with any other piece of this outfit: Patience and more patience. Between gluing everything else and this, I had to cut down my nails (I broke one at work) and found out that having long nails to grab the stones with is a huge help in rhinestoning. And thus, not having long nails slows me down.
To attach the headpiece, I added one hairclip in each side, and checked that I had enough hairpins to secure with behind each spike. It held on very tight!
Hold tight, as next up is the boa, stola and skirt, all covered with fakefur!
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