Hey, it’s me, Hannah. After a week of taxes and job interviews, I have decided that the Girlboss™️ is dead. I’m ready to join my fungi overlords and just become a mushroom. You may have seen my mushroom hat displayed on my wall in previous videos. I very much enjoyed wearing this hat to previous fairs and festivals. I happen to have a couple of events coming up that will be very fae centric and I want to turn my mushroom top into more of a fairy’s hat.

And what sort of mushroom fairy would I be without fairy wings? That’s right. With no previous experience or even true knowledge of how to do it, I, Hannah, will be making wearable fairy wings, inspired by Amanita muscaria. My vision for this project is essentially just red butterfly wings with white spots, and I’ve decided to shape my wings after the iconic monarch butterfly.

So I traced the wings of the monarch and turned it into a bit of a pattern which you can find on my website if you’re interested in recreating these for yourself. There are a ton of different ways to make fairy wings using a ton of different materials. I am choosing to use wire and cellophane to get that sheer yet I guess iridescent look, kind of leaning more into the fairy side of things.

So I’ve ordered some 14 gauge wire, the extra of which I could use for chainmail down the road and some red and white cellophane. I’ve got some needle nose pliers, some wire cutters and some white floral tape, as well as some sheer spray adhesive. And my hot glue gun is warming up. I also got my pattern printed out. You can always just come up with your own shape, of course, but I do recommend putting it on paper.

That way you sort of have a map to follow. So I’ve kind of got a plan together. Let’s get started. Yeah right. I wish it was going that fast. I have been at this for hours, specifically adding the floral tape, and I’ve finish one of my four wings and not even totally finished it, honestly. Putting the floral tape on it takes forever.

I am slowing down even further because when I added the hot glue to try and potentially even out some of the connection points, I just made it worse. It’s extra goopy, so I’m taking my heat gun and just warming it up so that it is less bumpy before I put the floral tape on, which again is taking forever.

So I’m probably going to wrap my night up as soon as I’m done with this, because that will probably be hours from now. 

I still only have three done. This is not the way to do this. Find another way. I’ll see you tomorrow.

It’s day two. I wrapped up my last wing this morning, and it…It probably took about 2 hours per wing. I don’t know if that is something that I will ever do again. It’s just for all the time I spent, it doesn’t look that great. And knowing that my next step is to sandwich the wire between cellophane sheets so it’s going to end up being covered up anyway.

I’m just…I’m just not sure that it was worthwhile. I have some thoughts on how I can clean this up and make it look a little more bold, but we will address that once we have our wire wrapped in cellophane. So now we’re on to the cellophane.

I wasn’t happy with how the lower wings looked after being wrapped in cellophane, so I took my pattern and used an X-Acto knife to carve out the wing shape using poster board, cutting two of each pattern, one for each wing. It was kind of tedious, but not nearly as bad as shaping, gluing and wrapping wire into the wing shape.

And I think it would be sturdy enough without the entirety of the wire structure. So this is probably where I will start on future wing projects, skipping most of the wire altogether. But since I had the wire, I decided I was going to use them since I thought that the extra structure wouldn’t be a negative. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider the weight.

But you’ll see more about that later. Okay. What a day. A long day of trial and error until figuring out exactly how I wanted to do this. And I am quite pleased with how everything turned out. So I’m going to go ahead and wrap up for tonight. Tomorrow I am going to finish the construction of the lower wings, add the white tufts to each of the wings to give it that mushroom look and then put it all together and hopefully walk away with some wearable wings.

Good morning. Today is the last day I have to work on this. I’m meeting a friend for a little mushroom fairy picnic tomorrow, so I need to have everything done in order to join them for that. So I’m going to kick off today with cutting out in poster board the shapes of the lower wings and then hot gluing those cutouts to the wings themselves.

Those wings are already wrapped in cellophane. So I think I’m just going to paste over it and cellophane over top. And so it might be a little bit of a darker red than the top wings, but I’m hoping that that is just going to give it depth versus looking wild. So fingers cross on that. Worst comes to worst.

I can always kind of start over, rip the cellophane off, do my best to try and get it down to just the wire. But honestly, I think this is going to work out just fine. And then once I have those lower wings finished, I can go ahead and connect all of the wings specifically to a, essentially a U-shaped kind of harness or like insert that I will be able to put into whatever apparel I am wearing.

Probably a corset if I know myself. Also, a corset would add a little extra structure too, and I can cinch it up really tight to do my best to keep the wings from moving too much. Once I have that finalized, all that will be left to do is to add the white spots. Similar to my hat, I think I will be using some sheer fabric, sheer white fabric to create these little tufts and just kind of hot glue them straight to the wings.

And I might go a little smaller than the tufts on the hat just to make sure that you can still see the detail of the monarch butterfly wing cut out within the wing. And then once I’m done with that, I think I’ll have a pair of wearable wings. I think I’ll become a mushroom fairy. Just wow. So I just got back from frolicking in the woods with my good friend Cel and their wife Jess. Cel actually just started a YouTube channel, so make sure you go check them out. I’ll link to it down below. We had such a fun time. Just, just being out in nature, ignoring all of our responsibilities, you know, typical mushroom fairy things. The wings held up fairly well considering they’re really heavy and not as structurally sound as I had hoped. I definitely had some trouble trying to keep them up.

It’s kind of a mess on the back. I don’t know if you can see it that well, but I’ve got tape and wire and hot glue all over the place, even though it looks beautiful. And I’m very happy with the way that the red cellophane with the white dots ended up looking. I’m going to go ahead and call this a bit of a fail, just because of how not supportive it is and how not structurally sound.

That said, I’ve learned so much and I have everything I need to restart this process and make a pair of fairy wings that I think would work. Number one thing I learned is, of course, don’t spend all of your time outlining the shape in wire. It’s just going to add weight. When I go to redo this for myself, I will just use the poster board for the shape of the wing, wrap that in cellophane, and then secure the wire to the outside of the cellophane and poster board to get that U-shape that I can insert into my clothing.

All this to say…how cute!? This is exactly what I needed for this week, to escape from reality for a little bit. Even if it was just a couple of hours, in the words of the friend. If you want to give me a follow on Instagram, you’ll definitely see some photos from our little Mushroom Hang Sesh and I will definitely post follow ups of any other additional wings that I try to make.

I do have one more event where I would like to wear fairy wings, but these…I feel like these are ready for display only. I don’t know if I can wear them out in the wild anymore. This was a really like cathartic puzzle for me this week, and I had a lot of fun making it. And if you had as much fun as I did, it would mean the world to me.

If you would like and subscribe. And if you do, I will see you back here in two weeks for my next video. Take care.