Tamboured sleeping Beauty headpieces

I realize that I have not added anything to this blog in months, which is of course not good.
What have I been up to lately: a lot.
In April the local ballet company  revisited Giselle. (see blog post).
Sometime at the beginning of May, I received an order for several headpiece for Sleeping Beauty: all six of the prologue fairies, Aurora and the King and Queen.
Since I had the "luxury" problem of needing to get regular practice with my tambour work and needed to make the headpieces I decided to combine the two.
The client sent me samples of the laces, trims and fabrics for all of the prologue fairies and I then looked through my vast stash to find the right types of laces, beads and crystals to use on the headpieces.

Sleeping beauty: song bird, Beauty and Generosity fairies

Various gold laces for Sleeping beauty fairies

I then framed up fabric and lace and set to work, tambour embroidering thousands of beads, sequins and crystals onto the lace "shapes.

Tambour frame set up with three of the nine headpiece bases

 

 

 

 

 

Since I had less than 5 weeks to make and ship the headpieces out to California, so I tamboured as if my life depended on it. For the song bird I choose gold, yellows and smokey Topaz colored beads, sequins and crystals. I had trouble finding suitable lace for the Generosity fairy (it was shades of gren with silver lace) so I drew a stylized frieze of honeysuckle and worked it it green bugle beads and silver and yellow seed beads.

The bases for the Song bird, Beauty and Generosity headpieces

Slowly adding beads and sequins; the birds "wings" are to the left

As the days went on the weather became wonderfully sunny and I discovered that it is possible to take tambour work outside. The combination of the gentle breeze, sunlight and lovely view was inspiring. Slowly but surely the headpieces grew. 

My work space

The only headpiece that would be a more traditional wire frame, Aurora, did have several tamboured lace jewels. These were gold lace Asters, worked in red, gold, and pink crystals, gold bugle beads, gold sequins and fuschia seed beads.

Left to right: Violente, Aurora, Lilac, jewels, Beauty and Generosity

The Lilac Fairy was a large, pale gold lace collar worked in purples, gold leaf shaped sequins and Toho beed "flowers".

Lilac fairy headpiece

For the King and Queen, I decided to use a thermo plastic (Wonderflex tm) for the crown shape. I found two stunning gold laces which I used to cover the "frames" with and again using tambour and standard bead embroidery I created large gems.

Queen and Kings lace coverings

Jewels for the king and Queens crowns.

Since using all crystals would make the headpieces too heavy, I created the jewels out of large cut glass gems, surrounded by sequins and crystals.

Thermoplastic crown base, covered with gold lace.

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Fairy of Beauty

Violente Fairy

  Finally all the headpieces were assembled and off they went to their dancers. My photography skills are still very poor, so these photos do not do them justice. Thank fully the company shared a few photos with me which  I re-post here.

Generosity Fairy (or Woodland Glade)

Song bird fairy

 The dancers with their headpieces:

Generosity, Beauty and Charm

Aurora