While reading though my one of my history books the other night, I came across a photo of the contents of The Royal Cemetery Of Ur and remember always admiring the amazing headdress worn by the Queen and the headdresses of her attendants. So I promptly decided to make that my new craft project since the other things I've got going on right now are pretty boring to me and I always liked a challenge. So I set out online to find a mannequin head to serve as the base for this piece and found a not too expensive of one for sale and snatched it it before I could be outbid. I think I'm going to paint a couple thin layers of plaster over the whole mannequin head so it loses its plastic look. She's also bald so I don't know if and how I’m going to add hair but I'll deal with that later.
The headdress is made up of a couple different parts so I'm taking each section apart and figuring out what I can do by all the photos and research I've been doing on it. The first part I started working on is the two separate strands of golden beech leaves. I'm recycling tin cans and cutting out the leaf shapes from that and embossing the leaf pattern then painting them gold. There's 12 leaves on the first stand and I’m guessing 24 on the second so I cut out the 12 leaves for the first strand last night and painted them gold. In the actual headdress the stem of the leaves act as the spacers to hold the strands in place, so on mine I'm going to have to figure out another way to make this happen. I'm probably just going to cut out a thin strip of tin can and poke two hole in it and slide that on the strands and paint the beads gold to look like its part of the tin can leaves I made. I thought I had enough blue glass seed beads to start the actual beading but I had to order and bunch last night so I’ll start the bead work whenever they come in, probably Thursday. For now I’m going to work on the remaining 24 leaves, and the 14 "willow" leaves for another part of the headdress. I'll post pictures of my progress tomorrow.
Keep an eye out for updates!
One of the headdresses found in the tomb.
