A crash course in fabricating fascinators

So, the last time we spoke, I was telling you all about the event which I attended dressed as Mrs. Peacock, the character from the game of Clue.

The day of the party, I got home at 5:00, two and a half hours before we were supposed to leave for the event. I scurried into the basement to gather supplies from my stash of floral-decorating miscellany. I've always had a penchant for artificial birds; when I was young, I used to buy one or two every time I visited Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, and I now have quite a collection that I just can't bear to get rid of because you never know when a fake bird is going to come in handy...like now! I found two matching blue birds which reminded me of peacocks...with a little imagination. I took one of them for the project.

I also happened to find in the box this magnificent bundle of glitter-coated beads on a wire, which had been part of a Christmas decoration I bought a couple years ago at Joann Fabrics, at a very heavy post-holiday discount. I tired of the decoration after a while, but no one wanted it even when I Freecycled it! I felt like it could do better things than line the bottom of a landfill, so I found a home for it deep in my florals box and let it sit, waiting for its moment to sparkle...like now! It was just the kind of thing to put on a fascinator—flashy and bouncy, and blue-green, which was perfect for my color scheme!

The last missing piece for my fascinator was a handful of feathers. Just the weekend before, I'd been tidying my jewelry-making cache, and I'd finally decided it was time to get rid of the feather earrings I'd already retired a year or so ago. On Sunday, I'd taken them apart, kept the hooks and chains, and tossed the now dingy and ratty feathers in the trash. Now, 6 days later, I was feeling really lucky that we hadn't taken the garbage out on Tuesday, because I was able to rescue the feathers from the bin and use them for my costume!

I washed them first, but even after a bath in dish soap, they still looked dirty. Besides, white feathers would not do for my green and blue costume! Fortunately, I still had some of the green dye I used on my hair last summer. Dumping the feathers on a plate, I coated them liberally in dye and then left them to sit while I worked on some other parts of the project.

Now that I had a good collection of doodads to put on my fascinator, it was time to figure out a way to put them all together. That was the tricky part. I've never made a fascinator before.

I have a couple of ornate headbands with big head-covering parts that have felt pads as a base. Unfortunately, I don't have any felt lying around. I googled "base for fascinator," and found a bunch of pictures of mesh-looking things in various small shapes. Mesh... mesh...how about a window screen!? I have quite a stash of window screens, because I can't resist picking them up when I find them in someone's trash. At one point, I'd had some metal screen that I thought would be perfect for this purpose...but I couldn't find it.

I did find this terribly shabby, torn-up piece of window screen that clearly wasn't good enough to keep bugs out of a window...which meant it would be great for experimentation!

I folded it in half so I had two layers, and then laid it on top of a plastic bag and painted it green. I figured the green paint would give it a more appealing color, as well as stiffen it up so it could support the weight of the things I was going to attach to it.

To give it a rounded shape so it would fit more naturally on a human head, I spread it over the bottom of a mixing bowl while it dried.

And to speed up the drying process, since by now I only had 1.5 hours until it was time to leave, I placed it directly beneath a heat lamp.

While it was drying, I took time to shower and do my hair and makeup. After that, I checked the drying base and found it so dry, I decided to add another coat of paint. Then I dried my hair.

When I was done gussying up myself, it was time to get back to work on my accessories. The feathers had been sitting in the dye for at least 25 minutes, the minimum recommended time, so I took them out, rinsed them, and patted them dry. They took a nice emerald color.

I removed the now-dry fascinator base from the heat. Miraculously, my paint job had done just as expected and turned the floppy screening into a semi-rigid curved sheet. I cut it into a smaller circle, and got out that which would become the base for my base: a metal headband.

This was the point at which I stopped taking pictures, as I was getting – literally – right down to the wire.

I poked the bird leg wires through the base (Craft birds usually have wire on the ends of their legs so they can be attached to various decorative objects), then I wrapped them around the headband to keep them stable.

The blue-green bobbles were also, conveniently, positioned on very thin wires, so when I removed them from their original base, they were easy to poke through the fascinator base at a few points in a circle around the bird.

At first, each of the three wires formed a high loop way above the bird, so I poked them down at the center of their arch to double the number of loops and make them shorter and more perky. I sewed the looped parts to the base.

So far so good; the last step would be the feathers. I wasn't sure exactly where I wanted the feathers to go, but as soon as I experimentally positioned one on the base, I saw it: I would fan them out behind the bird just like a peacock's tail. A drop of hot glue for each feather was all it took!

To finish the fascinator, I made sure all the wires underneath the base were looped around the headband with their prickly ends on top, so they wouldn't stab me in the head all night. I affixed those in place with more hot glue.

Here's how it looked when finished (actually, I can see the wires still sticking down, so these photos were taken shortly before it was finished)!



My fascinator was not high enough quality to keep for a second use (and by the next morning, the feathers looked like they'd had enough of this world), but the whole thing held together almost all night. The threads holding one of the glittery loops broke, so that part kept popping up, but other than that, I was golden.

So in conclusion, you don't have to be a milliner to make a decent fascinator. Just have a large hoard of random glittery fluttery things, a hot glue gun, some old window screen, some paint, and two hours!