Race Ready

Now there is another side to “leotarding”!!! Something which complements the finished leotard.

… Headgears…

This is not my forte at all and is the one part that I definitely say I am not the best at. It is always they last thing I think about and generally they take me a long time to make.

The one thing I have going for myself is that I am creative, so I just keep going till I am happy with how it looks. And when I think back to all the headgears I have made … they are all predominantly asymmetric, which definitely would account for why these headgears take me soooo long to make!!!

So today I though I would tackle a headgear for the blog; one that is a little horse inspired, seeing as yesterday was the horses official birthday in the Southern hemisphere. Hopefully it is spring race worthy!!! Fingers crossed :)

To start of with I draw and cut out the structural shape out of buckram. I did this by free hand, however if you were doing more than one I would make a template.

Then I glue around the inside of the outside line of buckram and place it down onto the lycra and leave to dry. Now because this buckram as been stored around a cylinder shape, I meant that had to put something on top to weight it down. Once that side dries, then you repeat on the opposite side.

Now before I glued on the opposite side I added a metal piece through the center of the buckram so I could bend to shape later, which I just hand sewn.

The next step was to add a little bit of glitter, just around the edge of the shape and on the inside I did a fine check pattern to add some difference.

Once everything is dry I can bend the gold part into the shape I wanted and then add the feathers. I also used two different types of feathers, which I have stuck together.

I have added little diamond shape lycra on wire to the feathers. This just makes an added difference and ties in the gold. To attach the feathers I have just hand sewn the feathers to the underneath of the gold part.

Now for the final product :)

xxx