Every year this darling garden fairy is on display at the local renaissance faire. Normally she sports wings that are much smaller but since someone stole her wings last season, I decided to create new pair that would work well with the materials that I had on hand.
Since, the kind people at "MD Hobby & Craft" sent me a sample of their 1” Mesh Chicken Wire to review, I decided to put it to the test and use it to make the replacement wings for the garden fairy. The strength of the MD Hobby & Craft chicken wire was just right. I found that is was easier to work with than the wire I could buy at my local feed store. The size and weight of this chicken wire would make it easy to add some ribbon and look perfect on my fairy and at the Ren Faire. I had my friends Ginger and Lorelei help me with this project to finish it faster, however, it can also be done by one person. Some of the pictures are not that great because we actually made the wings at the faire site, so there were no electric outlets to set up lights.
Materials Needed:
- M-D Hobby & Craft 57513 Chicken Wire, 2 by 8-Feet
in the 1” Mesh
- M-D Hobby & Craft Tin Snips Metal Cutter
- Long nose pliers
- M-D Hobby & Craft Metal Working Gloves
- Heavy Weight Paper
- Scissors
- Pencil
- Ribbons
- Spray Paint to match the garden fairy statue
- Protective Eye Wear
- Some friends to help you with the project
Step 1:
Use a heavy weight piece of paper and draw out the wing
pattern. Using the scissors, cut the
paper template out.
Step 2:
Put on the heavy weight gloves to protect your hands. Lay the paper template onto the wire and use
the wire cutters to cut out pattern.
Step 3
Once you have cut out the wings, you need to use the long
nose pliers to fold over the wire around to create an outline. My gloves were a size too big, so I had to
remove them to do this. However, I would
not recommend that since the wire is pretty sharp.
Step 4:
Continue to do this to both wings.
Step 5:
Use the spray paint to paint the chicken wire wings to match the fairy statue. Place aside and allow to dry.
Step 6:
Once the paint has dried, start weaving the ribbon through
the chicken wire.
Step 7
Add different lengths of ribbons strips to the wings so that
the wind will add movement to the wings.
To finish you may want to add some dried flowers to the wings. I choose not to and attached the wings to the
garden fairy statue. This is how they came out.
The great part about these new wings is that they are easy to store and the ribbons can be changed out to suit the occasion.
