This post covers the making of my fascinator for my Betty WOW dress.
The initial concept was simple – make some miniature cardboard cameras and attach them to a base. I bought heaps of coloured cardboard, some foam board and began by making boxes of various sizes.
I also picked up a white fascinator base from Made Marion, some blue tulle and battery power fairy lights.
I planned for 5 cameras and spent a bit of time each night after dinner decorating them to match cameras from the fabric. I made sure one of the cameras was big enough to accommodate the fairy light battery pack.
The Polaroid camera is my absolute favourite! I liked the “modern” green camera the least but I wanted some variety.
The decoration took a lot longer than expected so it wasn’t until Saturday morning, the day of the WOW show, that I began to assemble them. Keep in mind I also still needed to under-stitch my dress facings and hem it but I was sure this would only take me an hour and the fascinator wouldn’t take much longer, hot glue gun at the ready!
The previous night NH suggested I include some film negatives in my fascinator which was a brilliant idea and sent me digging through my boxes full of old uni projects until I found some.
I got to work nice and early:
Harri helped…a lot…
I started by covering the plain white base with some left over fabric and I stitched bias to the exposed edge. Then I attached the comb by hand stitching through all layers.
I played with adding the cameras in different configurations as well as some blue tulle and lengths of film. I used masking tape to mock up the positions. I spent over an hour playing around and taping bits together but I was getting really frustrated, nothing was working.
So I stopped for a bit and finished off my dress instead.
Sometimes when you have a problem that needs solving the best solution is to stop actively thinking about it and do something else. Your brain will continue to work at it in the background. This is called passive thinking and if you feel like you’ve been hitting a brick wall while working on a problem it can really help you find a solution.
So I returned to my fascinator and instantly realised that I was just trying to cram way too many ideas into one small thing. My base was too large, the camera fabric made it too busy and the blue tulle made me grumpy.
Next I picked my three favourite cameras and played around with the film, creating loops inside loops and attached them like feathers.
Here are some close ups of the remaining cameras and the fabric cameras they were based on:
I added some film curls and strips to fill in the gaps between the cameras and to soften the edges. It stayed in place all night long and was nice and light on my head.
I still wish I could have incorporated the fairy lights but that’s ok, I’ll keep them up my sleeve for another time 😉
Supervising is such hard work!
Last weekend was the first ever North Island Sewing Meet (that I know of anyway 😉 ) so I cruised up SH1 to Rotorua with a few of the Wellington Sewing Bloggers to make some new friends and sew up a storm.
the curious kiwi 