How to make a crown for a Joffery costume!
We recently were invited to a Game of Thrones/Star Wars fancy dress party for my brother's 30th birthday. My brother had decided to go as Joffery as he has blonde hair and looks like the character but he couldn't find a crown to use, so he asked us to help him out!
Tasked with making a crown, we both set about thinking what we could use to one, get the intricate detail and two, something that would be durable enough for him to wear at the party. We decided in the end to use thick wire to make the base, thin wire for the top of the crown, and then modelling clay to build around it.
We started with the base and using 2 thick pieces of wire that we had bought from eBay we formed the bottom of the crown. We measured my brothers head so that we knew it would sit nicely when completed and wrapped the wire tightly together using tweezers and made sure there weren't any sharp edges that could puncture my brothers temple!
Once the two pieces of wire had been moulded together we started to look at the pictures of the crown from the TV show. It's divided into 4 sections all with stag type horns, with a large jewel in the middle. The horns all have an assortment of different edges and it was going to be hard to model the wire and clay in exactly the same way, so we made the decision that we would copy the main parts of the crown but leave out the really intricate pieces, which would be hard to mould and would likely fall off and ruin the piece.
We started to model the clay around the wire and this got very messy! We had to keep using water to keep the edges smooth and also we used a small pen knife in order to ease the clay in the small finicky areas between the antlers on top. It took a while to complete and we took a half each so we could both work on it at the same time.
Once the wire was covered with clay, we then started to use the penknife to cut small shapes in the clay located at the base of the crown. This mimicked the detail that King Joffery has in the crown he wears.
When the clay was dry we painted the crown gold, with 2 layers to help with the shine. We also had the 4 red jewels on the top painted red, and then a small amount of gold paint so that they sparkled but weren't too bright, just like the real version. This took a few hours to dry each time we painted it, but came out really nicely afterwards.
As you can see the crown finished off my Brother's Joffery outfit and was a great extra present for him on his 30th Birthday!
