A worbla crown for a queen

For the yearly autumn school break I decided that the activities would be centered around knights, it felt logical since we just opened our exhibit about the Middle Ages. I'm going to post mora about it later but this is about one of the things I made.

I don't like working with hard materials, but a year ago I bought a sheet of worbla to try and work with it. Now was the chance to do that, and since the goal was to just make something that looked better than a cheap toy crown I felt that was a suitable challenge, without too high demands of accuracy.

I took my sheet of worbla and cut out some fleur-de-lys shapes in a band, the same size as my head, or rather a bit largers since the crown would be shared between me and a guy. I then heated up the worbla and fixed the ends to each other.

First lesson: The worbla was quite soft, but it was hard to get into the small details, so it would have been better to use a knife instead of a pair of scissors. The crown only uses one layer of worbla, and it's quite flimsy. Good enough for a toy crown, but if I ever make anything else like this I would use double layers. Also when I tried how strong the seal between the ends was, it was easy to pull apart so I superglued them togeter instead.

The next step was to smooth the surface. After having read a ton of different tutorials I decided to go with gesso. I ordered some at Slöjddetaljer.se. Even after 10 layers of gesso, with a lot of drying time inbetween, it was clear that the texture of the worbla was still visible. I had used up about half my can of gesso at this time. Since this crown is just a toy I stopped at 10 layers though and sanded down the surface. I also stopped with the gesso when Pilerud posted that in order to get a smooth worbla surface it was best to use a sheet of transparent worbla, which is completely  smooth, rather than applying layers and layers of filling and then sanding them down.

After the sanding I spraypainted the crown gold. It's clear that with enough patience, and gesso or other filler, you can get the worbla really metallic. There are some patches of the crown that looks like that, but the texture of the worble is quite visible on most of the crown. Still I'm thinking that it looks a bit like a hammered metal look. I finished the crown by gluing a pack of plastic crystals on it.