Building a Holiday Fascinator

This weekend I attended the Holiday Gala for the American Opera Society of Chicago. It was such a lovely evening. I decided to wear the dress that I wore to the opening night of the opera, but I wanted something special for my hair.

Fascinators are really quite simple to make. I used three flowers and then layered them with feathers and stamens that I made from gold wire.

I began with a rather inexpensive poinsettia bouquet that I bought at a local craft store.

Because the flowers have been smushed together, they can look a little sad.

Choose the flowers that you would like to use and then simply steam them back into shape. Do not sit your iron directly on the petals, but a good burst of steam will do wonders. As you steam, position the petals back into place.

 The flowers will come back to life.

Once I had the flowers looking as they should, I simply hot glued the three flowers together at the base of the stems.

To make the stamens, I used a gold wire that you should be able to buy at any craft supply store. I bought mine at Joann's, our craft and fabric store.

For the stamens, cut off a length of the wire and form a loop in one end. 

 I hold one end with my needle nose pliers and in the other end I insert a small knitting needle and then begin twisting. Twist and twist until you have a tight stem. 

 You can see below that I continued to make loops until I had 5 stems made.

In the rings of each stem I glued rhinestones. You can also buy these in bulk at the craft store.

This is the glue that I used. Simply put a little glue on the ring of the stem and then press on the rhinestone, one on each side.

For the beaded stamens, I simply threaded a gold bead onto the wire and twisted.

Once the wire was twisted, I bent the end so that the hot glue had a little something to hold on to when I place the stem inside the center of the flower.

The silver pieces that you see radiating out of the flowers came from this piece that I also purchased from the floral department. It's actually plastic so it hold its shape.

I simply cut pieces off and then determined the length that I would like for them to be, cut them down and hot glued them inside the flower.

Once this was done, I played around with the black feathers. Just a drop of hot glue on the tip of the feather and placed them inside the petals.

In order for the underside of the flower to not show when I wore the piece, I added ribbon to the back. This also gave me a very nice area to hide pins in order to attach this to my hair. The ribbon was looped around and then sewn to the the base of the flowers.

In the picture below, you can see the dress a little better. I received lots of compliments on my little fascinator. It really was a lot of fun to wear.  

I know that it can be a little intimidating to wear something like this. But if you have an occasion to wear something lovely, a wedding or hey even a graduation or for that matter, any celebration, do so. People seem to love it when you take the time to add that special touch. A fascinator doesn't need to be elaborate, just something simple as in the picture below adds such a lovely touch to your garment that most likely, you slaved over. Why not add that special touch?