The Mask....

Hello.........  I'm a member of craft club locally and every year so far we have had a exhibition. This year for one of the themes we were each given a cardboard mask to decorated.

I decided I really wanted to use flowers on my mask in some way and started to play around with some ideas, I ordered some lovely mulberry flowers and set to work.

First up I gave the mask a couple of coats of acrylic paint, and then started cutting and gluing the flowers onto the mask.

I attached them with glue dots removing the stamens from some of them and adding little sparkly gems.

To form a mask over the eyes.

I then decorated the sides with sequin leaves, gems and a larger mulberry flower. (I'm a little bit in love with these paper flower)

Next up came the tricky bit, I really wanted to make a fascinator type structure to add to the top of the mask, the only problem was 'I hadn't got the first clue how !!! ' So after much head scratching I came up with a plan.

Using some florist wire, glitter butterflies, beads and paper flowers, how hard could it be ? well it turned out  to be quite tricky.  Why do I have these ideas and make life so hard for myself.

So I started wiring it all together

Threading on some beads, which I held in place with PVA glue.

Adding a few sequins and gems as I went. The whole thing was a bit unstable to say the least and precariously wired together and them clipped with a large pink butterfly.

The next problem was how to attach it to the mask I tried super glue but it just keep sliding off and collapsing, leaving a very stress Clare when the glue melted the paint on the mask, which thankfully after repainting I was able to hide by the pink butterfly.

 

In the end a friend had the bright idea of wiring it to the back of the mask and then gluing it in place with some extra strong glue she uses for making glass fused jewellery and yay in worked.

Ta-Dah

Fascinator attached, I had originally thought the mask would have been finished at this point but on hanging it I decided that the glitter lips were a little too pale.

So I bravely took the decision on the morning of the exhibition to re do them using a bright pink glitter glue, they are not good as I'd have liked them to be but I think they work so much better than the paler colour.

Ta-Dah

My completed mask.

 Here it is up on the wall in the local library, with some of the other masks, I'm loving all the glitter and sparkle and how they all turned out.

Happy Crafting 

Clare xx

I'll post a little more about the rest of exhibition another day xx