Topaz: All Tangled Up.: Hats Off!

Apologies for the accidental hiatus. I've been too busy working and crafting to come blog >.<

Now I have to make an embarrassing admission; that I as a grown-ass woman play a game that revolved around pixel ponies and appears on first blush to be aimed at children.

When you take a closer look at it, you aren't surprised to find that the youngest players who stick around tend to be at least high-school age.

Now the game seems to attract the creative and artistic section of the online population, and the kind of talent most often represented is traditional or digital artwork. In order to bring crafty people out of the woodwork a group of players run seasonal themed extravaganza events -complete with competitions.

It also helps to add a bit of variety to the game. There are only so many pretty pixel ponies you can collect before you run out of space for them.

To my great excitement, the most recent Extravaganza event was Steampunk themed.

I LOVE Steampunk!

And I had a bowler hat lying around that I couldn't wear because it makes me and one of my best-guy-friend look far too much alike.

It was the perfect confluence of events ^.^;

Here is the hat that got attacked:

And the original swathe of supplies:

I've never tried to Steampunk anything before, and I'm not a fan of warm colours (And Steampunk stuff is generally in browns, creams and bronzes) so I went for black, silver and blue.

Because High-Class Steampunk Ladies could theoretically exist, and if they did they could afford to wear high-maintenance colours.

That and because I could, that's why!

I made a hatband by folding wide black lace in half over the blue ribbon and sewing it down to mute the blue a little. I used glass seed beads to hide my stitches, since I didn't have any sewing thread that matched the ribbon OR the lace >.<

For the fascinator I wrapped the two feather tassels together with silver ribbon and glued a pair of chain earrings into the back of a button to cover my horrible glue-gun work on the feathers.

I really really wanted to put a Hex Key behind the feathers, but my spare was so darn small you couldn't see it back there. It was a no-go. Instead I stuck some cog-like beads onto a useless little spanner and put that on. It really needed proper clock guts, but I didn't have any on hand.

Here we go, the finished hat:

From the left. . .