Steampunk Glinda the Good Witch: crown

I am basing this costume (loosely at least) on the original Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz movie, so I needed a crown.  Looking at images of Glinda the Good Witch showed me that her crown is basically as tall as her head!  So that meant I needed to create a really tall crown pattern.  I basically messed around with butcher paper until I had something I liked. 

I know it is hard to get a guess on size off a picture, but the crown pattern is very tall.  The crown in 6.25 inches tall for the base and 11.5 inches tall to the top of the points.

I am going to apologize now, this next part gave me quite a bit of trouble and I forgot to take pictures of the construction.  Since this is a steampunk rendition, I decided the crown should be made of  metal, and preferably copper or brass colored. I also wanted it to be lightweight so it wouldn't hurt to wear.  I decided to use decorative sheet metal from the hardware store, it has a cloverleaf pattern punched in the sheet metal and a bronze color (link to what I purchased). One thing to note, the bronze color is only on the surface, I found this out when I used a wire brush on my Dremel to clean up the flux from soldering.  Once cut, this sheeting is really easy to shape and bend into the crown shape.  We then soldered the crown closed in the back using a piece of brass to strengthen the crown (this stuff is really really pliable on its own). Since the metal was a bit sharp, I edged the bottom with leather both inside and out.

The leather looked kinda plain, and the original crown is really pretty decorated, so I grabbed some rhinestones and went to town.

Here is the finished crown. The weld in the back is pretty ugly (see the last picture), this stuff was not the easiest to solder. Other than the back seam, I am pretty pleased with the crown, as it is really lightweight and comfortable.   My only concern now is how I will manage to fly with it to the event so I can actually wear it!

Steampunk Glinda the Good Witch Hoop Skirt

My husband and I are planning to attend the Labyrinth Masquerade Ball this year and are in need of costumes.  Since time is short and there is not time to do a completely new costume, I am trying to finish up a costume I started a few years ago, a Steampunk Glinda the Good Witch. This costume was wearable, but very unfinished, so this is a good opportunity to finish it up.


The first issue is that the hoop skirt I originally made for it is 1 inch wide steel bands riveted to leather.  While this is really fun to wear, it wont fit in the suitcase as it doesn't fold or bend at all.

To get a hoop that can fly with me, I purchased a cheap bridal hoop.  This hoop can be folded up to fit in a suitcase, but is made out of something that feels like a cheap tent......

The overskirt to this dress is actually sheer so the hoop will show at least a little bit and I also wanted to be able to wear the hoop without the overskirt.  So I went to the local fabric store and bought some bright pink sheer stripe and iridescent PVC to remake the hoop skirt into something Glinda appropriate.

I made a bunch of strips of the sheer stripe to make ruffles and strips of the PVC to cover the hoops.  The hoops were then suspended from ribbons hung from the waist band. This hoop was pretty simple to make but very very time consuming.  The PVC is absolutely nasty to sew on, it sticks to the foot of my machine.  I have heard there are special feet that can handle this stuff, but none of the ones I have did a good job, so I resorted to the old tried and true method.  I covered the PVC with thin tissue paper, stitched through the tissue paper and then tore it off the seams when finished.