Adventures in Haberdashery

I have an important announcement to make: Despite popular belief, I am not dead.

Due to my long hiatus from Singing Dragons, I have no doubt that this became the popular belief nationwide. I'm sure that my myriads of adoring fans have been utterly bereft without me. Well folks, I'm back, and I didn't actually die. So you can come out of mourning now.

What have I been up to, you ask, during this unnecessarily long hiatus? Well, dear reader, among other things, I have been making hats. My obsession with steampunk has only continued to assume greater heights while I've been away from this blog, and I have created two hats.

The first (my second-ever attempt at hat making, after the creation of a so-so fez) is the fascinator below, made of cardboard, hot glue, faux-leather, and some embellishments that were lying around the house.

That one turned out pretty well, so I made a small top hat next. It took a lot of black fabric, ribbon, hot glue, and episodes of Doctor Who to get it finished, but I did it! I used flowers, lace, a tiny compass, and some gears as embellishments.

~Naddie Boyne

The Most Excellent Apparatus of Cool

On Friday the 13th (my birthday), I went to the End of the World Ball, a homeschool dance put on by a group in my area. (It was awesome, but I'm still mad that they didn't play R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World As We Know It). Because the theme was the end of the world, I seized upon this excellent opportunity to dress steampunk.

For those of you who don't know, steampunk is a kind of science fiction. Think Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, gears, goggles, Victorian-era dress, time machines, complicated and ingenious inventions, really cool hats, mad scientists, gentlemen adventurers, and steam. Lots of steam. Anyway, one cannot dress steampunk-style without some sort of weapon or tool. In the steampunk world, I'm fairly certain that lacking a type of apparatus is against some ancient law or other. Hence the title of this post.

I made the Most Excellent Apparatus of Cool out of an old plastic slide whistle, tinfoil, widgets found in the basement, and liberal amounts of bronze paint. I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out:

What does it do? I have no idea. That is why I called it The Most Excellent Apparatus of Cool: I don't know if it's a tool, weapon, or even if it's just a cleaning brush (however, I sincerely hope it's not the latter). I'm flirting with the idea of making it sonic, but I have no idea how to go about it and I'm not very good with electronics. (If you can think of some way to achieve this, by all means leave this spark of brilliance in a comment and be rewarded with the knowledge that you have my eternal gratitude).

I loved making the Apparatus so much that I have begun to keep spare widgets that I find around the house in a plastic box on my bookshelf, to use for future projects. My mom even promised me that when the vacuum cleaner breaks, I can have the pieces! Squee!

~Naddie