Wedding Fascinator

A friend of mine got married this weekend, which is always a good time to do some fancifyin'.

Another friend of ours did the design for the invites and overall "theme," so I got an idea. I asked her for the Adobe Illustrator files for the sweet Z design with the little birds (both the bride and groom have Z last names, and no they didn't meet in homeroom) and ran it through the embroidery machine with an eye toward making a hat. See, the idea of doing my hair for a wedding gives me the cold sweats, but making a hat? Fun.

The invites featured a subtle black-on-black leopard design, and leopard was an accent throughout the wedding, so even though I was wearing black/blue tiger print, I wanted that leopard represented. So the first thing I did was stitch the leopard spots in black on a very dark blue felt, to make it more texture than pattern. Then the gold Z (one of the wedding colors) and a satin-stitch heart to finish the shape off. I did this on a good felt, hooped without stabilizer. If I were going to do any more detailed embroidery, I'd have used stabilizer. But for essentially nothing but solid shapes? Naked!

With the stitching done, I could carefully trim the shape just outside of the thread. Felt doesn't ravel, of course, and by keeping the edge thread color very close to the felt color, the edge looks clean.

Then it's time for decorating!

I have a long history of working on various projects on Project Runway night. So I got my little glass head (which usually holds my motorcycle helmet) and cheap red wig (don't pretend you don't have one) and freeformed it. I started with the blue and gold dangles to go right in front of my ear. Then the blue tulle I have a couple of yards of, with no idea why. Folded it on the long edge, ran a basting stitch along the fold, and hand-sewed the ruffle along the edge that would be away from my face. At that point, I knew I wanted feathers, but it was anyone's guess how that would turn out.

I found the bright blue feather set and the long black singles at my local Joann. Even though I already had a selection of feathers -- man, is there anything I don't already have too much of? -- I didn't seem to have quite the ones I wanted. Typical, huh? The blue and black looked perfect though. And I already had the yellow. So I sat with my small scissors and glue gun and trimmed and curled and glued until I had something I liked. Then I attached it to a thin hair band, rather than stitching a comb or something to it.

I wanted the hat to have something to look at from every angle, so I wanted there to be some height in the feathers, plus some length for the back to give the people in the rear pews something to look at. I guess that went well as I was complimented by a late-arriving friend on my "spider legs." Maybe complimented is too strong a word.

The bride herself didn't get to see the piece until late in the reception of course, since she kinda had her mind on other things. When she finally did, though, she loved it. So it was absolutely worth it. Another friend said "I've never seen a themed wedding hat! You should have one for every event. For every day of the week!" How sweet would that be?

When I was getting ready to leave, I joked, "Well I guess I can just go home and throw this away now... Not like I'm gonna wear it again!" A couple of the women at my table were aghast. "No! You should give it to her!" Oh yes of course I'm going to give it to her!