Lately, I have been busy travelling so I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to spend on my bonnet. However, I have started trying to make flower petals for it. Whether these will form part of the NeoPixel flowers or other flowers on the hat remains to be seen, but the first one looks something like this:
It is made from a jewellery wire skeleton, padded with electrical tape before a final material covering was glued in place. Below are the steps on how I made it:
Step 1: Cut around 16cm of jewellery wire with a wire cutter. (The jewellery wire is something I had lying around the house for a while and I seem to remember purchasing it in one of the pound shops in the town near me.)
Step 2: Bend the wire in half.
Step 3: Using round nosed pliers, bend approximately three quarters of the wire into a tear drop shape. Something like this:
Step 4: Where the wire meets, neatly bend the wire.
Step 5: Wrap the wire in electrical tape. (This can be a bit tricky and may require a number of short strips rather than one large piece.)
This is how the jewellery wire skeleton and wrapped "petals" looked side by side:
Step 6: Wrap with material. This can be fiddly/difficult to do, but if you pull the material tightly as you are wrapping it around then no glue is required until you get to the end (the sticking out point) and then PVA glue is sufficient to keep everything in place.
And that's it. I'm now on the hunt for some acetate or sparkly paper/card to fill in the "hole", but I may just leave it out if I don't think it looks right. Whatever the outcome I need to make at least 4 more of these pesky things!