Alongside doing my personal project designing The Iron King and the live project of Fermented Honey, I volunteered to collaborate with costume interpretation student Louise Fry in her major project. She was designing and making a gown based on Guinevere and Camelot and she needed someone to make a headdress. We had a meeting and she showed me her designs for the dress and mood board images for how she wanted the headdress to look. She wanted a gold headband piece with leaves and thorns on it I went home and started making tests. I tried a method of making wire leaves and dipping them in pva glue to fill in the middle, which I painted with nail polish when the glue was dry. It did work but was too delicate and the gold wire was turning green under the glue.
next I tried to fill in the space with wire to try and emulate the veins in the leaves, I bought spiked beads online for the thorns, this worked but looked untidy to me and was a little spiky so wouldn't have been the most comfortable to wear.
,Then I found some sheet metal online 3cm wide, gold covered aluminium, and used this to cut out leaf shapes. I poked a hole on the base of the shape with a drawing pin and scratched on vein lines, I wrapped a small piece of wire through the hole to attach it to the band. These looked much better and balanced out the thorns which were quite thick.
I decided to braid three pieces of thicker wire together to make the band stronger, I then also made some of the leaves out of the thicker wire too to add variety with the slid gold ones. This worked better and was stronger aesthetically.
I then handed this back to Louise who added pearls, ribbons and felt leaves to match her dress.