Spending the week as a medievalish queen

I haven't updated in a while. I have been working away though, but I thought that I was going to try and not make a lot of small updates but a big one when I'm finished on my current project, which is also my HSM challenge for February. There have been some delays in that project though.

Anyway, now for something completely different. For this year's school holidays we have decided to have a medieval theme, since the only part of the museum that's finished and open is the early history, up to around the 1530s. Children who come to the museum get a paper with different tasks that they need to finish, and when they have done that they can come to the king/queen and get knighted. I'm the queen of course on the days when I'm working.

I also decided that since a king/queen needs a crown I would make something easy and try out worbla. I had bought a sheet some time ago intending to make the crown and sceptre for Queen Elsa out of it.

I started out with finding a crown template and cutting it out in the worbla.

I only had access to a regular pair of scissors though so it was hard to get the finer details cut out. After that it was time to put gesso on, sand, gesso, sand and so on. (gesso was bought at slöjd-detaljer.se)

I had heard that 5-6 layers of gesso would be enough, but this is the crown after 8 layers of gesso. There are some spots that are really nice and smooth, but most of the crown is rough. Now since this was a fast project that was only intended to at least look better than a plastic crown that you could buy at the toy store I felt that it was enough, but I'm hesitant to use it for Elsa where I want it to really look like metal.

The last thing was to just spray paint the crown with some gold paint and glue some plastic crystals on, they were also bought for Elsa but I've since decided to make the jewels myself whenever I get to making Elsa.

All in all my experience with worbla is that it was a quite easy material to cut and shape, the surface is too rough for someone as impatient as me though. I have heard that transparent worble has a lot smoother surface so I would be willing to try that in the future.

The king and queen of course neeeds a suitable throne room. The museum that I work in is in an 18th century building and one room, that was the combined meeting room and church for the mine is quite big. (We still use it as a church a couple of times a year). To make the room feel smaller and more inviting we have a structure that we can put up as a circle to make a room within a room. I decided that the room should look like a royal tent, with the king/queen being on a visit to the mine.

I'm quite happy with the result, especially since interior decorating isn't exactly my thing. It of course helps to have access to some 18th and 19th century chairs and a lot of velveteen pillows. The royal mantle is a really old bedcover from IKEA. I've lent it now to so many different things where they need something royal that it was well worth the money.

I'm wearing my fake Mary of Habsburg gown. It's totally inaccurate but people get impressed by the shiny gold. I also get to play with a really nice sword when I knight the children. (it's blunt so I don't risk hurting anyone). In this picture I'm actually wearing my HSM project, it's a smocked shift. I could have made a post about it, since it was finished. You can see how uneven and gaping the neckline is though, so I decided to rip up the whole neckline and start over with a new shape for it. More to come on that...