DIY Faerie Wings!

Here is my very first pair of wings, completed this morning!

I used the Faerie Muse tutorial as my guide; she gives excellent details, though I admit I skimmed through some parts. (Note 9/4/2016; that tutorial has been offline for several months so I removed the link).

20130828_110453_resized

Notes:

1. I’m a perfectionist, so I put this off for a long time. How long? Years. Every time I saw a web tutorial, or an artisan page about faerie wings, I would dream of making my own. But I was so afraid of screwing it up, or trying something new and making a horrible mess and having yet another half-finished project… silly but powerful fears. Now that I’ve done my first, I cannot stress enough: IT’S NOT THAT HARD.

  • The iridescent cellophane camouflages a lot of flaws, because light is bouncing off of it everywhere, confusing the eye. These are not perfectly symmetrical. There is a hidden tear. There are visible folds in the cellophane from how it was packaged. But the overall visual effect overpowers the flaws.
  • I’m familiar with first attempts at a new craft being big old wastes of time, or, “learning experiences.” “It’s all about the process”, friends will say, trying to be kind about the pile of junk I find myself tasked with the disposal of. While I did learn from this, I also ended up with wings I’ll be happy to wear.

20130828_100205_resized

2. I had the wire-frames already made (the wire is wrapped around with floral tape. They took an hour or two, if I recall. Deciding on the initial design was probably the hardest part.

3. Here I have sandwiched each wire-frame wing between two pieces of cellophane using spray glue. I didn’t use much because I was counting on the iron fusing together the cellophane, which it did in a more limited way than expected. I was glad to have a cheap craft heat gun on hand; it seemed to improve the bond.

Next time I will use more glue. I might try just glue and the heat gun and eschew the iron altogether as I don’t like the possibility of gumming up my iron.

20130828_100358_resized

4. In the above image, I have torn the cellophane while trying to pull apart the layers in order to space the wires more evenly. I gave up trying for perfect symmetry and repositioned the torn bit of cellophane with more spray glue.

20130828_102722_resized

5. The torn bit camouflages with the crinkly look caused by ironing the cellophane. Unfortunately, the crinkles didn’t hide the fold marks (my cellophane came in folded sheets).

6. I folded over the edges and attempted to seal them down with superglue. It wasn’t very effective and I can’t feel my fingertips, but I did have a hot glue gun handy, and it turns out, it is much easier to use than super-glue.

20130828_110459_resized

7. The wings, bent back from the center piece, have a graceful dimensional quality I wasn’t expecting!

20130828_110508_resized

So now that I have wonderfully shiny faerie wings, I will have to put together a costume to model them with! I’m particularly excited to get some reference shots for my artwork 🙂

One thought on “DIY Faerie Wings!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *