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Last-Minute Fairy Wings

I'm so glad to live in the internet age! When our kids were invited to a fancy dress party, one of them decided he wanted to dress up as a fairy, and we just couldn't find those ready-made fairy wings in the kids' room's chaos, a brief internet query resulted in loads of DIY instructions on how to make your own! What I describe here is the result of spontaneously combining some of those instructions. We managed to do all this within the remaining 90 or so minutes before the kids hat to leave for the party!

Required

  • 2 coat hangers made of wire
  • self-adhesive plastic film
  • some silk fabric remnant
  • duct tape
  • some kind of ribbon (rubber strap or similar)
  • scissors, needle and thread, and the like

Step-by-step Instructions

First, bend each coat hanger into a wing-like shape, making sure both hangers end up featuring more or less the same shape. Straighten the hanger's hooks, subsequently twisting them around each other, thus mutually connecting the two wings (1).

Transfer the pair of wing's outline onto the adhesive film, leaving some extra space by drawing the outline a bit larger than it's actual size (2).

Cut the wings' outlines out of the film (3)

Carefully and slowly transfer the film onto the (possibly ironed) silk (4, 5).

Now cut out the film-silk-sandwiches; cutting just inside the outline (rather than exactly at the outline) will give you nice and smooth edges (6)!

Now it's time to fix the wing faces to the coat hanger wire shapes by sowing them together with some coarse stitches (7, 8, 9).

As a safety measure, clip the surplus parts of wire before attaching two ribbon loops (for the child's arms) to the connecting part between the two wings (9, 10). To further increase safety, wrap some duct tape around the connecting part to prevent any sharp bits of wire from sticking out (10).

Finally, as a final touch, wrap some additional silk fabric around the connecting part and fix it with some stiches (11).