I always had an idea for a more fantastic styling for the Fortuny Delphos dresses. Like a queen in a fairytale. Originally I only made the golden Delphos dress and bought Ravenna’s crown (Snow White and the Huntsman) for it. But then I did the purple Delphos dress and it obviously was the evil queen, so it got Ravenna’s crown. Now I needed a new crown for the golden Fortuny dress. And again I was running out of time…

So I did some internet research on how to make a nice crown myself. I thought about something like the wood elf crowns in the Hobbit movies. And the I found a beautiful, organic elven crown on Lenora Gewandungen, which looks as if it was grown from a tree. Her version is made from wire and Worbla. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any Worbla on such short notice, but my local art store has a good selection of Fimo, including the new Fimo Leather, which remains flexible after curing.

I forgot to take pictures of the wire substructure, but it was mostly two wires twisted together, otherwise they were unstable. With a more sturdy wire one strand might suffice, this is how Lenora did it. I only modeled the bigger branches with wire, because the crown already got rather heavy. Then I encased the wire with Fimo. Unfortunately this wasn’t that easy, because Fimo is very soft and not really meant for such big pieces. So I rather often squashed the Fimo parts I already modelled. This is why I cured everything at a lot of intermediate steps. That is possible without problems.

After the wire was completely encased the elven crown still looked a bit scrawny, so I added smaller branches made only from Fimo. That worked a lot better, since the base structure was already sturdy and I didn’t have to wrap the Fimo around stubborn wire. I rolled small Fimo sausages and wrapped them around the thicker branches and twisted them in on themselves, which created a nice effect.

Now I liked the overall shape of the crown, unfortunately now with all the layers of Fimo it turned out to tight. So I cut it open in the front and remodeled the open ends. The crown is closed now with two pearls on a short string that are squeezed between the branches. Completely open the crown doesn’t stay up, because it turned out too heavy.

In the end I painted the elven crown with spray paints. I even did it rather elaborately, with brown as a base coat, then white highlights from above and black shadow from below. Over that I sprayed gold color. And then very little black and white to mute the gold a bit.

This sounds as if I had done everything according to plan and in order, but I jumped between the steps quite a lot. So don’t worry if it doesn’t work on the first try. All materials are very sturdy and can be remodelled again and again. If I had to do this again and had more time, I would switch to Worbla again though. Fimo is a bit too soft for such big projects.