Wire Top Hat

Since the newspaper dress wasn't quite what I wanted so I went back to my costume designs for AMW - my most favorite design was the Top Hat design, so I thought that I would try and make that as a more comical design which is what I got a sense of the most when researching the AMW pageant.

The first part I set out was making the main part of the costume the hat - I would need to make a circular tube and then the brim of the hat. I wasn't sure of what material I would make it out of I had thought of using cardboard but it would be hard to make the circular shape and would be more like a box which I didn't want at all - so I instead decided to use chicken wire to make the frame.

However, the damn chicken wire was awful to use and kept pinging back and rolling up on itself and after many attempts at trying to stamp the wire straight which did include me jumping up and down and stomping on it like a 3 year old toddler in a temper tantrum - which is definitely how I felt at this point. So in a terrible attempt to help the me twisted the clipped edges together I wrapped it around two bins and a manikin - that held it pretty well and I managed to do without to much trouble.

Finally Managed to Get the Chicken Wire Bent together. 

Not the best of photos but I stood inside my wire frame with a feeling of great success of actually managing to get the wire in the correct shape that I had wanted.

The next step was to make the brim of the hat and to make sure that it was reasonably sturdy and held its shape without too much strain on the main body of the costume. I did try to recycle and the scrap chicken wire but it didn't fit to well since the wire pieces looked too jaggered and didn't work at all, I thought about using grey board/cardboard before but it would weigh it down. 

So instead I rolled out that damn heavy roll of wire again and placed the body of the hat on top, then I worked from the inside out, I cut the circle from the inside out and then tied the wire to the body with it attached I was then free to cut out the rest of the brim (please excuse the bins, the wire was a pig that kept curling and wouldn't stay put.)

To make the edges a little more within the health and safety guidelines and to help it retain the brims shape and also to make the shape a little more circular I wrapped the clipped edges around the some of the rolled wire - this was a good move since it made the brim look a lot better.

The Final Wire Frame

I was really happy with the wire structure but it was still a little flimsy and I had thought I could paint the hat black so to do so I thought I would cover it all in newspaper and see if that could work - I wasn't looking forward to paper-mache over chicken wire again but alas I must do it! I think if all else fails I think I will have to go to the fabric shop and buy some fabric to cover the hat.

I started from the top of the hat in big pieces so to cover more of the hat easier but it kind of sagged a bit so I used smaller pieces which didn't have such a bad sagging effect unlike the bigger pieces.

I turned the hat upside to cover the rest of the wire structure a little better which definitely helped me cover it a lot better.

I managed to get inside the frame to stick newspaper to the inside of the hat so to help the newspaper on the outside of the frame .... however it failed miserably and to avoid causing harm instead of good I stopped and went back to covering the outside instead.

I managed to get the whole main body of the hat done and I since I'm quite impatient I found a hair-dryer and set about trying to get the newspaper less sopping, it proved to be a bit more useful since it showed where piece of newspaper needed gluing down better or where I needed a another piece of paper to cover a hole etc.

Before I left I turned it around the proper way which wasn't such  a good move because the newspaper that it had been sitting on decided to come with it and so a bit of the top newspaper ripped slightly, I knew that I would have to put a second coat on the frame anyway so its a definite must do now, as well as covering the brim of the hat.