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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Other styles of hair decorations

During the past few weeks I have been learning how to make a variety of (ballet) hair decorations.  One set is loosely based on the Japanese art called tsumani kanzashi, which uses silk and sometimes cotton fabric squares. There are a large number of tutorials on YouTube that show how to fold and pinch the flowers. I was truly inspired by this  kanzashi documentary. It is all in Japanese, no comments but I was still able to "understand" what they were doing by watching. Japaneses kanzashi uses habotai silk, a glue made from rice starch, and all the bases are hand-made of metal disks or even card board.
When I started I used mostly polyester and nylon organza and charmeuse, which you can melt to stop the edges fraying. What I ended up making was more traditional style flowers.
While digging through my vast fabric stash I found some real silk and started folding the tiny squares. I also ordered some of the special rice starch to make the glue but it has not yet arrived.
At my Etsy store I received a number of request for (uncommon) headpieces or head-dresses and I realized that I really needed to have more on offer so... After doing a lot of research into the various ballets (Talisman, Diana and Acteaon, the Pharoh's daughter, La Esmeralda etc.) I realized that several have "oriental" (in this case meaning other than Western) or "ethnic" themes. Ballet's interpretation of this is a sort of mis-mash nationalities. I loved some of the photos I found of traditional Thai, Chinese, Chaldean, Roman, Greek and Indonesian wedding headpieces and went a little crazy.
Start of a Diana (or Acteaon?) headpiece in gold

Besides discovering that I have too much stuff, I had a lot of fun and have put together some nice things. Some are built on light weight wire and fabric circles
Le Corsaire, or Gamzatti?

Solar?

Same headpiece but with gem down

or on horse hair



Flowers on horse hair


or on horse hair and rigelene frames:

La Esmeralda, not sure if I will add the coin trim

Possibly a Diana headpiece in silver with a diamante moon.

My husband makes most of my wire frames which are needed for the more heavily, jewel encrusted head dresses but I will have to wait for those.
None are finished yet but I will post photos once they are.

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