A light up flower crown

Worbla Flowers

To go with my sugar skull plague doctor mask, I wanted a flower crown and I was thinking it would be really fun if the flowers could light up.

To make the flowers able to light up clearly I made them out of  transparent Worbla thermoplastic.  This stuff is really fun to work with.  You simply heat it with a heat gun and shape it.  Basically, I cut shapes like you would out of felt to make roses and heated them to shape them together.  I made both large and small roses, 4 of each.

Circuitry

My husband has been learning to add more complex electronics to our costume props so he thought it would be cool if the light up flowers would change colors based off of the movement of my head.  He designed programming and circuitry to do this.  The head motion is sensed by a triple axis accelerometer, the programming is uploaded to an Arduino mini, the lighting is done by 8 Flora RGB Smart NeoPixels, a cheap switch and the power is a 9 volt battery.  In the picture to the right, the small square board is the accelerometer, the larger board is the arduino.  Both of these pieces are much smaller than the 9 volt battery.

He used this same set up to light up a crystal in the top of his steampunk cane.  The major differences are that the cane used a NeoPixel ring and that the calibration was different.  He can turn the cane upside down and my head cant turn that far.  Basically the motion of my head causes the lights to change color and the calibration makes even small movements change the color of the roses.

hat base side

hat upside down to show dart

hat front

I made a hat base out of 2 layers of felt and one layer of really stiff, heavy Pellon interfacing.  Basically this is a very elongated oval.  I darted the back to make it fit my head.  I then wired the edge and covered the wire with bias tape.

hat back

One the base was made I stitched all the circuitry to the hat and hid the circuitry with faux rose leaves.  I then stitched the clear flowers to the hat base and accented the base with small red and large white roses.  The three roses at the back hide the arduino, accelerometer and battery.

Hat front

hat side

hat top

 Here are some pictures is low lighting with the hat lit up.  The hat does all the colors of the rainbow and more....but the circuitry is very sensitive and it was hard to find the right angle to show all the colors.  This hat is so much fun to wear and the NeoPixels are so bright!

HSM for March: stashbusting a Regency hat

For the few of you asking what happened to the blue challenge in February, I am still working on it but the handwork is taking forever.....I do intend to finish the dress one day but February was unfortunately very optimistic for me.

The HSM challenge for the month March was Stashbusting.  Like almost every costumer I know, I have a ton of accumulated stuff.....bits of fabric that was perfect or cheap or maybe a bit of trim that was too much to throw away but too little for most projects.  Stashbusting is a good thing and something I need to do far more often as my stash is embarrassingly large.  In searching through my stuff I found a lovely piece of dupioni silk in forest green. This piece has been in my stash for years and is too small for anything other than a hat or a purse.  I have been in need of a new Regency hat so I decided on a quick Regency hat for my stash project.  Going through the rest of my stash, I found buckram, millinery wire, flannel, gold buttons, gold and green trim, a small piece of gold ribbon, green glass bead trim and forest green thread.  This project came entirely from my stash at hand.

 My inspirations for the shape were the Quickie Capote by Jen Thompson of Festive Attyre and the fashion plates webbed by Ginger from Scene in the Past on her flickr page.  However, I did make most of my hat up rather than copy any thing exactly simply based on personal preference.

Basically, I played around with paper until I got a brim shape and size I liked the look of. Once I had the size, I cut the brim out of 2 layers of millinery buckram and then machine stitched wire around the entire brim. 

The wire was stitched down using zig zag stitch and the edges of the wire were just overlapped by several inches as you can see in the photo.  The stitching of the wire was the only machine sewing I did on this hat.  I just really hate to stitch wire down by hand.

Since the wire would easily show through the thin silk, I added a flannel layer (called mulling) to give the silk a smooth line and hide the millinery wire.  The flannel is just hand stitched down with big stitches.  
 At this point I held the brim up to my head and measured the distance around the back of my head not covered by the brim.  For me this was 7 inches.  I needed this measurement to cut a small piece of the silk that could be used to bind the edge of the gathered back of the hat that would not be hidden by the brim.  I cut an 8 inch (1/2 inch added to each side for seam allowance) strip 2 inches wide to bind the back of the hat.

Hat back

The back of the hat is simply a huge circle gathered to fit the brim and the 8 inch strip of silk.  In my case, I have very long hair and often need to make extra room in my hats to accommodate my hair. If you are making your own hat a smaller circle may suffice.  Mine is 26 inches across. Since the silk is so thin, I flat lined it with some cotton muslin I had laying around to give it a bit of body.  The gathered circle was handstitched into the brim and the small strip of silk.  Then the brim lining was handstitched  down to hide the raw edges. 

Hat side

Hat front

The hat is decorated with some stash buttons and stash trim. All the decorations are handstitched onto the hat.  Although I needed lots of room for my hair, I felt the back of the hat could use some structure.  I took inspiration from Jen Thompson's Quickie Capote and gathered the very center of my big circle of fabric to make pleats.  I covered this gather with a button from my stash. 


The Challenge: Stashbusting

Fabric: green silk dupioni, white cotton muslin and cotton flannel
Pattern: none

Year: early 19th century Regency
Notions: thread, buttons, antique glass beaded trim, gold ribbon, gold and green braided trim, millinery buckram, millinery wire
How historically accurate is it? Maybe 70%? I made up the pattern and it is more likely historically inspired rather than historically accurate. Also, I am not sure if this grade of silk would have been used in the Regency period. 
Hours to complete: 15
First worn:  not yet
Total cost:  None, all of this was from my stash.
Stashed for how long? The trim and fabric have been stashed for at least 8 years.  The buttons are part of of a button stash passed onto me by my mother-in-law 16 years ago, so I have no idea how old they are!

Steampunk Vented Top Hat

My husband's one complaint with Steampunk is how very hot everything is and since we live in the desert, I often have to find ways to make thing a bit cooler for him.  At a previous Wild Wild West Con, Susan Holt taught a wonderful class about adding vents into your Steampunk hat to make things a bit cooler.  Since we were returning to Wild Wild West Con and Tucson, I thought my husband could really use a vented hat!

If you are interested in making a vented hat, Susan Holt makes the leather gaskets and the mesh vents in really cool shapes and sells them.  Susan is happy to provide information on installing the gaskets and she has an album with the gasket shapes on her professional facebook page here.  Susan even has shapes like butterflies, gears and stars!  I highly recommend her gaskets, I saw them in person at the recent Wild Wild West Con 4, the gaskets are lovely and come with the matching screen. She also occasionally sells premade and wonderfully decorated vented hats on her etsy site here. 

The base for this hat is the John Bull Top Hat from Hats in the Belfry and is wool felt.  I talked to Susan Holt to tell her how wonderful her class was and how much I enjoyed making one of the hats and in this discussion she told me that the felt hats are much easier to work with than the cheap costume hats.  Secondly, the copper screen that Susan uses is much easier to work with than what I used.  I planned to use copper screen for my vents, but could not find any so I am using decorative aluminum punchwork stuff I found at the local hobby store. The aluminum stuff was a pain to drill holes for the rivets and I think the screen would have been easier.

First I played around with powerpoint and figured out the size for both my vent hole and my gasket.  Once the sizes were right, I then cut out both sizes in paper.  I decided on 2 vents, one on each side of the hat.  I cut 2 of the large size in leather and 2 in the aluminum.  I then centered and cut the smaller oval in the leather to make the gasket and provide an opening for the vent.  I used leather shears to cut the leather and tin snips for the aluminum.

Next, I cut a hole through the hat where the vents would be placed.  This whole is the smaller window size NOT the large size since I want to be able to rivet the gasket and the vent to the hat.  To cut the felt, I used an Xacto knife and carefully cut out this hole.

Next, I punched the rivet holes into my leather gasket using my leather punch.

I then, used this gasket to mark the drill holes in your vent material.  I then drilled holes in my aluminum vent to allow the vent to be riveted to the hat. 

I then took my gasket and lined it up with the vent hole in the hat.  I used a chalk marking pencil and marked the rivet holes in the hat.  I then used the same leather punch to punch matching rivet holes in the hat. 

In addition to vents, I planned to run PVC tubing with EL wire in it in and out through the hat.  I punched some large holes and set these holes with grommets to facilitate the tubing going from inside the hat to outside the hat.

Next, carefully rivet your vent and gasket to your hat.  This part sucks, it is really hard to set rivets in a hat, but I thought the effect was worth it.

Now repeat for all other vents!

For my specific hat, I was going to a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea sort of theme, so I made some octopods out of polymer clay to add to the hat.  The blue clay has glitter in it and I hated working with it so much!  The blue clay was really brittle and did not want to work into any shape. The white clay is actually translucent and it was fine to work with.  I really don't know why the blue glitter clay was so awful to work with. 





I then added the EL wire and tubing as well as some brass pipe fittings to complete the look.  Here is the finished hat!  The power source for the EL wire and the extra EL wire are hidden in the top of the hat.

Hat front

Hat back

hat side 1

hat side 2

Lace mini hats

I have been working on the embroidery and on new Regency stays and I am finding they are both taking so long.  I really wanted a quick project as a pick me up that I could finish in 1-2 days.  I decided to make a mini top hat using the free standing lace machine embroidery patterns from Urban Threads . My embroidery machine is so very old that it requires constant babysitting while stitching but this was perfect as I could work on my hand embroidery while my machine stitched away.  For those who have never done this sort of thing before, there are great tutorials on Urban Threads, but I have included some pictures here anyway.  The only major change I do from the basic tutorials is that I find I need to double layer the water soluble interfacing or it completely falls apart with my machine. I have made 2 of these little hats.  The teal colored one is a mini tricorn and the brown is a mini top pat.  You can see here the stitched pieces with the top of the hat still stuck in the water soluble stabilizer. 

After the embroidery is done,  I cut away as much of the stabilizer as possible and then dissolved the remaining stabilizer in really hot water.  This takes forever, and the stabilizer feels like sticky glue on your pieces if you don't get all of it out.  After the stabilizer was gone and the pieces were dry, I just stitch the pieces together.  The Urban Threads tutorial suggests using your machine, I am worried I will just break a ton of needles so I always hand stitch the pieces together.  Below is the finished base for the blue tricorn hat without any decoration.

Here is the brown top hat with decoration added.

Front

Side

Back

 

 

I actually made this top hat for my Tentacle Kitty plush to wear at Conventions with me, although I may wear it myself at times.  So here is Tentacle Kitty with her new hat.

Teacup Hat take 2

Remember my last attempt at the Teacup hat?  Lots of fun but way too big for most things.  I decided to make a smaller one as a fascinator rather than a full huge hat.  I used the same pattern as my last teacup hat but I am going to include a bit more how to in this post.  First I traced all of the pattern pieces onto heavy duty one side fusible interfacing.  I made 2 copies of everything but the handle piece in the fusible interfacing.  I cut out the interfacing and fused it to the fashion fabric and lining fabric.  Then I cut the fabric.

Next i stitched the straight edge of the saucer pieces and the darts and side seams on the cup pieces.  I then stitched the lining to the fashion fabric right sides together, clipped the seams and turned the pieces right side out.  I did this for the saucer along the inner edge, the saucer bottom (the larger circle) and the cup bottom (the smaller circle).  I whip stitched the opening shut on the saucer bottom and cup bottom.  I did not machine sew the cup fashion fabric and lining together as it would be too difficult.  So I hand turned the bottom and whip stitched to fashion and lining together. 

I then stitched the saucer bottom and the cup bottom to the cup and saucer pieces by hand.  The outer edge of the saucer and the upper edge of the cup were cut with no seam allowance, since I decided to edge the cup and saucer with bias tape.  Over the bias tape I added silver trim and also trimmed the handle piece.

For decoration, I added a keyhole piece and key intended for scrapbooking, a ton of hot fix crystals and a small spoon that I got from the jewelry department of a local craft store.  Here is a picture of the finished teacup fascinator and the monster teacup hat I made previously for size.