Craft your own wedding attire
The dress code is crucial when attending a royal wedding, so you’re lucky to be celebrating from the comfort of home. There’s no need to visit a milliner or commission a hand-sewn gown for your viewing party.
There’s real value in “something borrowed.” Pillage your junk drawer, rum- mage through your jewelry box and dump out the craft bin: Everything you need is within your reach.
After all, you’re not the one getting married — this is Meghan and Harry’s day.
CRAFTS from L1
It’s perfectly acceptable to wear a fascinator secured to your hair with a clothespin, just this once.
“In true British style, you have to poke fun at yourself and go all the way if you’re going to have a royal wedding watching party,” says Jennifer Thompson, owner of Create Art Studio, a storefront art school on Danforth Ave. “It’s meant to be fun.” Crown Sure, your crown won’t be the real deal, but it can still delight your guests. Digging through a child’s toy box for a plastic crown is an obvious choice. Bright construction paper or tin foil are also great starting points (If you opt for tin foil, cut out your shape and glue it to cardstock or paper to make it more durable).
Once you’ve cut out your creation, jazz it up. Thompson suggests using a Sharpie to add designs to your tin foil crowns.
“It can be a really interesting medium to colour on,” she says.
Don’t stop there. Add stickers, glitter glue or stick-on jewels from the dollar store. Thompson has provided a helpful template on her website createartstudio.ca. Fascinator This is where things can get interesting. Brits love their fascinators — the more outlandish, the better.
“There are lots of ways to make fun fascinators,” Thompson says. She suggests using a dollar-store hairband, punching two holes in a piece of paper and sliding those onto the band. Decorate the paper however you like with flowers, foam stickers — all that stuff that seems to multiply overnight.
You could also snip a few fabric flowers off an old wreath and attach them to the band with a clothespin or bobby pin.
Ribbon is another good idea. Jennifer Refat, founder of Craftic, a craft tutorial site that focuses on using supplies you already own, suggests checking your closet. Many dresses and tops have loops of ribbon sewn into the lining for easy hanging — snip them off of an old garment, tie a tiny bow and glue it onto your creation. Fancy hat Refat suggests using a straw beach hat as a base. Dig into your jewelry box in search of fake pearls — or even Mardi Gras beads — and place them around the hat’s rim.
“I have broken necklaces that I say I’ll fix someday,” Refat says. “They would be perfect.”
Add a brooch or an earring that’s lost its mate for a little extra sparkle. Don’t stop there. Snip a few feathers off that boa left over from Halloween and glue those on, too. Pompoms, bits of lace? Yes, please! Bunting No royal watching party is complete without bunting.
“The bunting is key. It’s so quintessentially British,” Thompson says. “It’s easy to hang and it’s super cute. You can use Union Jack colours or Andy Warhol it up and make every flag a different colour.”
Bunting can be easy to make. Cut out a bunch of rectangles from construction paper or even leftover boxes from your Amazon deliveries and string them together with baker’s twine or leftover yarn. (You can just tape the string on the back of each shape or get super fancy and thread it through some holes.)