Nutcracker Headpieces

At this time of year, Nutcracker is just the thing. There are lots of post and ideas out there for tutus and costumes but maybe not so much for headpieces and certainly not for certain roles. If you were to search for it you can find endless Sugar Plum's, Snow queens and probably Arabian but how often have you seen a headpiece for the Dew Drop fairy, Chinese, the Merlitons or the party guests?
Several years ago I made a series of little hats for the party guests in the Nutcracker, including a rather fancy ruffled lace bonnet for the grandmother. In the version of the Nutcracker our local ballet company performed, the party guest come through the theater, and then walk onto stage, acting out that they are arriving at the house.
Nutcracker is often set in some middle to late Victorian style so I made the hats like late Victorian "bonnets", usually a small hat, festooned with ribbons and lace that sits towards the back of the head.

Late Victorian style hats

 Lynn McMaster has some wonderful tutorials and patterns for hats and period costumes. I do not own any of her patterns (yet) but did use her information as inspiration to make the hats I did.

Grandma's "bonnet"

 Milliners used to use something called a poupee or stylized head to drape and display their hats.
If you try searching for this, you will often see images of this:

A wig stand used as a poupee

but this is actually a wig stand. A real Poupee has a stylized face and they are very difficult to find.

If you do find one, they are often very expensive. You can have one custom made in Spain but again it is expensive. While looking for one I found an Etsy store: handworkstudio that sells instructions and kits to make a felt poupee. My daughter loves to do needle felting so I asked her to make me one.

I love my felt poupee by Handworkstudio

 This lead to the "birth" of Ruby. She has soft, pale pink skin, lovely dark brown hair, done up in a classical ballet bun and bow lips. She still needs to be felted (more) but she is lovely.

I was so thrilled with her that I put her to work right away to create a Chinese themed Nutcracker headpiece.
I had become interested in soutache tape bead embroidery

example of soutache tape bead embroidery

and after looking at several Chinese bridal headpieces

Chinese wedding headpiece

decide that it would be a perfect technique to use on my "creation". The traditional bridal headpiece is too big and has too many things sticking up and dangling to make it a practical or safe proposition for a ballet headpiece. I took some of the elements, mostly the gold, red (a color symbolizing good fortune) and turquoise colors, a few smaller side dangles, made with wire so that they would move but not bounce about, bend and become entangled in hair, or worse put the dancer off balance, or poke someone in the eye (if partnered). I sat and sewed layers of red, gold and sparkly turquoise soutache tapes around red crystal bicones, and blue/green round mock jade beads to create snakes or dragon shapes and added eyes, scales and other details with hot fix crystals and sequins. The little dangles were made of gold colored, lazer cut butterflies, Swarovski bicones and little gold colored leaves. I wanted to have something that would move and catch the light without being too heavy or a distraction to the dancer. I had found a very interesting gold mesh which I used and shaped along the front and back of the headpiece and to support the gold ruffled lace at the back. The whole headpiece was built on a sturdy wire frame.

Close-up of the soutache tape "dragons" and front jewels of the Chinese headpiece.

Completed Chinese headpiece on Ruby, my felt poupee

When Tutu.com announced a Nutcracker headpiece competition, I decided to enter this just to get some sort of feed back on the ideas. To my utter (happy) surprise, I was chosen as a semi-finalist. Since this sort of thing usually seems to be dependent on how many Facebook friends and relatives you can get to vote for you, and I only had three votes (two from my brother and his wife, thanks!) I did not expect to make it through the first round. You can still vote for my headpiece at Tutu.com Facebook Nutcracker Headpiece competition till the 30th of November 2013.
Earlier in the summer I had made a Sugar Plum

Sugar Plum headpiece made with Swarovski and RG premium crystals in crystal AB, Fuscia, Tanzinite and Light Colorado Topaz

and a Snow Queen headpiece

Snow Queen made with Swarovski, Czech and Vintage Crystal AB and sapphire

, both modeled by the lovely Bridget, and I still want to make a Dew Drop fairy but time is a strange thing in my house. I truly believe that the fabric of time is somehow broken as some things seem to take forever (laundry, house cleaning, anything tedious) but creating costumes seems to make time disappear. What seems like 5 minutes actually turns out to be hours.
I am now deep into making leotards and my first YAGP costume (very exciting) so  it will be a while before I can get back to these headpiece. It does look as if  after Christmas, I will be working on a comission for some very exciting headpieces but that will have to stay under wraps for now.
Have a happy, not too nutty, Nutcracker season.