I originally checked online for some fairy wing tutorials. Some of the tutorials were well done and the final product looked great - on their website anyway. But there is one thing I've learned about following other people's tutorials. Don't deviate from their directions, not even by a little bit. So if they tell you to use a pink handled paint brush, you had better use a pink handled paint brush. I'm not saying that other people's directions are that anal, but I seriously recommend you follow their directions to the letter. Otherwise, their instructions won't work and you'll wind up starting over. Or, like me, come up with other fixes that may or may not work... I've wasted a lot of time and materials when I don't follow directions to the letter.
Here's a great example. Abby wanted to be Tinkerbell for Halloween. I said sure. Here's an example of a costume you can buy for about $11.
Seriously, it's cheaper to just buy costumes now-a-days. Fabric and craft supplies have gotten so expensive. It use to be cheaper to get the supplies and make a costume for yourself, but not anymore. I probably spent $35 on Abby's costume all told. Not to mention all the time I spent on this thing. Ergh.
So anyway, I wanted a Tinkerbell costume that didn't look so cheap (like the one you can buy) and I didn't want it to look slutty. I mean, come on. Tinkerbell barely has anything on! Totally not appropriate for a kid! So, here's the costume I made.
But it totally needed wings. Wings would make this costume kick ass. So I started looking around online and found a tutorial for making adult wings. You needed wire coat hangers and white knee high stockings. So, I found wire coat hangers in our closets (yes, I couldn't believe we still had some too.) And I found some white tights in Abby's drawers. I figured since I'm making smaller wings for Abby, why not use smaller tights? Well, wrong!! Apparently the smaller tights were compressing the wire coat hanger frame too much. I couldn't get the form I wanted with the tights on.
Here's the form I wanted for the final product. They look like Tinkerbell's wings.
But, with the tights on, they looked like sticks. They wouldn't open back up. Ergh.
In desperation, I went looking for fairy wings at thrifts stores. At the very first store, on the very first rack, I found the exact shape of wings I wanted. Score! But they were wrapped in pink fabric and I wanted white/blue, or even green if I had to... So I decided to buy these for 60 cents and take them home to tear them up!
See? The form is exactly what I had created. And these wings were bigger!
I ripped the seams on the wrapped edges to remove all the fabric. Even without glue or whatever holding this together, I could see that the wire frame was already rusting. Yuck.
So I decided to wrap the frame in my own fabric (I used what I already had left over from her costume) so the wings would be green. And I would paint the edges rather than try to do such precision sewing. Plus the paint would help stop fraying at the edges. I mean, these wings didn't have to last forever after all.
I glued the fabric to the frame. In the picture below you can see that what I used to sandwich the fabric to the frame got stuck to the glue as well. At this point I was getting pretty depressed with the whole process. I decided to just keep going though because I figured that painting the edges would do a good enough job to cover the mess. Only one way to find out...
I also learned from the online tutorial that the most bling you can add to fairy wings adds to the fairy magic. I agreed with this and decided to glitter the edges too. I used an old cookie sheet for painting and glittering. It kinda helped to corral all the glitter, but, really, any time you work with glitter, it gets everywhere!!!
Here you can see that I'm painting right over the hideous edges where the glue had stuck to some paper. And before the paint could dry, I added glitter.
Then I added glitter puff paint to add some wing lines. But, because I was NOT paying attention, I added one set of lines on the wrong side of one set of wings. Luckily, once the paint was dry, it was fairly easy to pull the puff paint right up off the fabric.
I could have painted lines on both sides, but at this point I was running out of time and I needed these stupid wings done NOW!
Next step was to attach the straps that would go over Abby's shoulders. I used this method from the online tutorial too. That means I sewed the wings and glued them onto a felt tab that would hold them altogether.
The only problem was that I didn't know how the wings would hang until I sewed and glued them down and then fitted them onto Abby. The initial fitting didn't hang right. So I had to go back, adjust the lower wings down and bring the top wings down more (they're bigger and heavier and needed to sit lower for more support.) Sigh. So I had to take off everything I had glued and sewed and redo it all. Ergh!
Once that was done, I added a couple self adhesive "jewels" to add even more sparkle between the glitter puff paint lines. I also added a fabric flower with glittered edges to the back of the felt tab so that it looked like the wings were connected by a flower rather than a boring old felt square.
And here's the final product!
Whew! Done!
So, I had been doing some research about birthdays at Disneyland. I found this "Princess Makeover" party thing you can do for your little girl if you stayed at a Disneyland Hotel. It cost $$$, but I thought the concept was fun, and had decided that on her birthday, I'd do a Tinkerbell make over for her and she could wear her costume and wings around Disneyland. Abby wholeheartedly agreed.
Come on Disneyland!
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