First off, let me apologize for posting absolutely nothing last week. I thought I would have some time before my engineering conference to write up a couple of posts, but I didn't leave work as early as I thought I would on Friday (which means I in fact left later than I normally leave work) and I spent all of Saturday cleaning and packing before flying out on Sunday. Alas.
Secondly, let me note a change in schedule. From now on, we will have posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That might seem like shooting high since I don't always make the Tuesday/Thursday schedule I've been on, but I have my posts planned out for at least the next month. At least for that time, we will have three posts a week. Yay!
And because of this schedule change, Countdown to Dragon*Con is posted on Monday instead of Tuesday.
Okay. Are we all on the same page now? Good. Finally, to the topic at hand: my preparations for Dragon*Con.
Last Dragon*Con I wore a steampunk outfit which you can see in the picture to the right. I thought it turned out well, considering that last year was the first year I ever cosplayed. Of course, I didn't make that costume. I can't sew to save my life. Heck, I can never even remember the correct spelling of sew. But I ordered a Victorian suit off of a website called Recollections and I accessorized it with gloves, an oculus, a pocket watch necklace, and a fan. Nothing too fancy or crazy, but people seemed to like it. I like to think it was my attention to period specific detail that caused people to like it. Nothing too crazy.
Anyway, this year, I wasn't really excited about wearing this costume again. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I've worn it before. Maybe it's because I'm totally not wearing those boots again. They absolutely murdered my feet. (Going to wear a nice comfy pair of Converses instead). Anyway, I was just thinking about this costume and was like "meh."
Then when I was walking throw Hobby Lobby trying to figure out how I was going to make my throwing knives, and I walked into an aisle of clock making kits. And suddenly an idea blossomed in my mind. What if I made a clockwork hat/fascinator?
So I bought a clock motor, a clock face, and some extra long clock hands to make this clock:
It's hard to tell in this picture but it's not huge. The face might be six inches in diameter, but no bigger than that. All of the hands extend beyond the edge of the face, which is how I wanted it, but smaller clock hands could have been purchased.
Anyway, the idea was somehow to make it stick on my head. My first thought was to use some hairclips. So what I ended up doing was attaching a barrette base to the clock via velcro (I'll explain why about that in a minute). Then I tried hot gluing some clips to it. You can see the result below plus the beginning of the next step:
Now there is about a half an inch of space between the barrette base and the clock face, which means anyone who catches it at the right angle would be able to see the clock motor. That simply wouldn't do, since such clock motors did not exist back in Victorian times. If I was going to use it, I needed to disguise it so no one could see it. So I bought some black satin ribbon. I cut about three inch segments, glued it so the two ends met and it was one continuous piece, and then glued that to the clock face, as you can see above. The end result looked like below:
I removed the barrette base for that photo so you can see the velcro. As to why I used velcro instead of just directly gluing the clock motor to the barrette back, well the answer to that is easy and can be seen in the picture. I wanted to be able to change the battery and the time. This way, I can remove the barrette piece and access all the necessary parts of the clock motor.
I then put the base back on and tried to attach it to my hair. It was a failure. the clips I used couldn't hold the weight (which isn't that heavy. Maybe I did a poor hot glue job) and luckily I caught the clock before it fell to the ground. This unfortunate incident did bend the hands a bit, but luckily I was able to bend them back.
So what was I to do? Well I still had a ton of ribbon left so I cut a good length of ribbon, glued it to the barrette piece, and now I can wear it like a ribbon in my hair (or like a headband if that helps you picture it better). The ribbon holds it quite well (I went a little crazy with the glue), but to keep it from slipping around on my head, I'm probably going to use bobby pins to secure it. The end result looks like:
Lovely isn't it? I think I did a great job, especially considering I generally do not consider myself yo be crafty. And I'm really excited about this fascinator, and the extra edge it's going to give my steampunk costume this year.
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