DIY Edwardian inspired Hat

My mom decided to change her former wedding dress, which looks like vintage dresses. We decided to make it look less like a wedding dress and change the size so it fits me since we already thought about sewing an edwardian or regency stile dress ourselves.
To have a proper dress makes it a lot easier to just change it a little than sewing a completely new dress.
I will show you when it's done.
For now, I want to show you how I created a suiting hat that helps the dress to look less like a wedding dress.
My mom showed me -> this video about a woman creating an edwardian inspired hat herself which I used as a guideline.

Warning: lots of hand-sewing and precise work needed. If you are a rather unpatient person like me, listen to meditative, relaxing music. That helped me a lot to stay calm at any point where something went wrong. Also, it made me feel better and made this project like a meditation. Especially at the end, when I glued all the flowers on it was relaxing and felt like I was doing Ikebana on a hat.

This is what I used:

• Simple straw hat with big brim (light colour)
• needle & white threat 
• wire
• white taft (light fabric) and white chiffon
• Hot glue
• green coloured lace (or any sort of ribbon)
• lots of decorative fake flowers and leafes (and also feathers)

(For the hat, the fabric and the flowers I approximately payed 65€. It is also very time consuming. I worked on it for about 6 hours, but it was worth it.)

I used this simple hat and removed the black ribbon.

Then I measured how much of the wire (green) I would need  to sew it on the edge of the brim, cut it and hand-sewed it on (red) with a little bit of the two ends still standing out.

This helps to form the hat at the end, because in past times slightly bowed hats were fashionable.

At the end, I secured the ends of the wire with some tape and simply sewed over it.

I measured how much of the taft I would need to cover the brim of the hat and abut 2 to 3 cm over it and sketched this length all around the hat.

And cut it out.

Then I folded the taft over the brim, so it lyes tightly arount the edge of it. Therefore I needed to fold the fabric organicly (red). I glued it on with hot glue.

This is what it looked like. I'm not a perfectionist and i liked that the folds were uneven sometimes. It is also very hard to make them look perfectly the same, but you can try if you want.

Now I turned the hat around. I needed to cut it open again, but I left 1 to 2 cm at the edge.

Thereby I could roughly sew the fabric on the ribbon on the inner side of the hat, so that the folds on the other side would stay tight.

I cut out another circle of the fabric that approximately fitted the uncovered part of the hat.

I sewed at the edge of this circle with a gathering stitch to make it look like a bonnet.

After that, it fits the hat. With the rest of the threat used before, I secured it by wrapping the threat around and tighten.

After adhusting the folds a little, I glued the lace on with hot glue to hide the edge.

I cut one rectangle out of the chiffon, so that the long side can be glued on the edge of the brim and the shorter side would cover all the inside of the hat. My mom used a special tool to hem both long edges.

One of them I glued not to tight to the edge of the rim with small amounts of hot glue.

After that, the hat looked like this...

But the hat was too large for me anyway and I wanted it to fit on an edwardian like hairstyle, so I kept all of the rest on. I simply used strong glue and applied it in circles on the inner ribbon and the inside of the hat.

Then I glued all the chiffon onto itself so it still looks like this... 

With help of my creepy assistant I decided which side of the hat was the most beautiful, then I bowed the sides of it a little.

I had sketched out how I wanted it to look like before, now I just draped some flowers on it to figure out what looks the best.

I made photographs of all angles and started to glue them on one at a time (with hot glue, of course).

It turned out so pretty! What do you think?

Here are some close-ups:

Pimp your bag (easy)

Today I'll be showing you an easy way to pimp any bag you want.

You need:

• Bag which is made of fabric
• Safety pins
• any pearls you like
• any other thing you like. I took roses and crosses

1. Thread the pearls on the pins.

2. Pin the first and the last pin on the bag. Make sure not to make too many holes in the fabric. If the bag has two layers of fabric, just pin the pins in the first layer as shown in the pictures below.

3. Make chains by hooking the pins together. That's it!

I'd suggest to pimp a bag where you can actually see the chains... But with this technique you can switch the chains whenever you want :)

Ouran HSHC Nekozawa's Beelzenef DIY

Since Nekozawa is my favourite and because I love cats (and puppets, too), I will show you how to make his cat puppet named Beelzenef ;)

What you need:

• cream-white fabric for the puppet
• white fabric or felt for the eyes
• pink fabric or felt for the mouth
• neadle & thread or sewing machine
• scissors for fabric
• pencil and scissors for the pattern
• black pen to outline the eyes and mouth
• fabric - or super glue

Step 1:

Make a pattern which is much bigger than your hand for the puppet and also patterns for the eyes and the mouth. Draw them on and add the seam allowance, then sew.
Tip: it's better if you sew little bows between the head and the arms and not straight edges.

Step 2:

Trim the edges a bit and make little cuts on the curves (marked with blue), iron it and turn it inside out. Take a pencil or anything like that to turn out the hands and ears. Don't forget to iron every piece made of fabric.

Step 3:

Glue eyes and mouth on and outline them. Don't foget the pupils.

And that's it, you're done!
Tip: Put a piece of cardboard inside the puppet so the glue and the ink won't come through both layers of fabric.

Enjoy your time with your Beelzenef (don't forget to curse someone) and we will see next time!

Baking cupcakes

Fudge Brownie Cupcakes with chocolate ganache
for my best friend <3

Very delicious, but ganache takes long time to make.

Chocolate-Cheesecake Cupcakes

Also delicious and easy to make.

Chocolate Cupcakes with boiled baiser-topping and marshmallows

Very delicious but topping is a bit sticky and fragile.

All recipes from: cupcake heaven no. 2/2012 Jun-Aug.

DIY: eye patch (easy)

This is my second halloween DIY for one of my halloween looks. As you must have recognized the make-up I was doing wasn't uploaded yet. There's a simply reason for this: the edit crashed and now the video is a bit broken. I already uploaded it on YouTube but it's private for now. I'm thinking of doing the tutoial one more time but I won't have time for this before november. So I'm asking you if I should set the broken one public so you at last have a guide. Please tell me in the comments!

Now I should start with the DIY:
This is the eye patch of a character I created for a story I'm writing which is kind of similar to Another's Mei Misaki (or Misaki Mei, I don't exactly know) which is also my favourite character. So if you want to cosplay her sometime you easily can make the eye patch yourself!
So this is what you need for this:

• elastic band
• cosmetic cotton pads
• hot or fabric glue
• white fabric or flet

1. Take two cotton pads and cut two 3x3cm squares

2. Take white fabric or flet and cut two squares which are a little bit bigger than the others.

3. Glue the two cotton squares in the middle of one square of the flet.

4. Now look how long your elastic band should be so you can put it around your ears. Glue the ends on the flet like this:

5. Try it on and mark where you have to glue on the elastic on the upper side.

6. At last glue the other flet on top and you're done!

A variation is the eye patch of a pirate. Therefore you just need other shape, black flet or fabric and a black band:

Next weekend I'll be doing another halloween DIY!

DIY: bat mask (easy)

It's already october so I wanted to do some Halloween DIYs. I just forgot that today is a holiday in germany so i couldn't buy special things to do those. So for today I'm going to use what I already have to create a mask for my following make-up "Vampire Lady" which I'll be doing tomorrow.

What you need:

• paper and a pencil
• scissor for Paper
• tiny scissor
• cutter
• glue
• cardboard (stable)
• black cardboard or black foam
• sequins in black and other colours you like

If you want to fix the mask with a headbend you also need elastic but I decided to use a stick because it doesn't squeeze my hair. If you want to create the same bat like me follow the link below and print the image on the entire page or the PDF in the actually size.

-> Image

-> PDF

You don't need to have an account on dropbox for this, you can just skip the log-in and download it. On the top there is the shape for the bat and below it is the shape I started with if you want your mask look different.

So let's start with the first step! You can skip the first parts if you use the download.

1. Print the shape of the mask or draw one yourself and cut it out. Hold it in front of your face so you know if you have correct the shape, size or the eyes.

This is the shape I started with:

2. I drew that on a second paper so I easily could change the shape and create a bat. I also made the eyes bigger so I can see better when I have it on.

3. Fold it half so both sides of your mask look the same, then cut it out.

4. If you want to use a cutter to cut out the eyes then make sure to practise first because it is a bit tricky. If your cutter skills are worse like mine, cut out a little shape in the middle of the eye and cut it out with a tiny scissor.

5. Cut a bat out of the stable cardboard and one out of the black cardboard or the foam, which I was using. 

6. Glue it together. Make sure that it looks good and no part of the stable cardboard looks out, then let it dry for a few minutes. If you're using a headbend glue it between the both bats so you can't see the elastic.

7. Pimp the mask with sequins or whatever you like to use.

8. Normally you would glue the stab on the back now, but since i couln't go to the supermarket to buy some I must wait till next week...

Now you're done! This is a really easy DIY, just to glue all these sequins on really does take a lot of time. If I had gel glitter I also woul've given the bat teeth and eyes :/

Tomorrow I'll be filming the make-up which is matching this mask. Honestly, it will be the first time for me to do the entire make-up. Normally I just draw my eyes or use some powder, but I hope it will work!

Let me know if you want to do this DIY too ;)