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!