The 2015 Cinderella movie is probably one of the most visually stunning movies Disney has made in a long time. I am generally a Disney purist and against most “live action remakes” but this one was an absolute masterpiece. One of the best parts (of course) was Cinderella’s dresses. She not only had a stunning blue ball gown but also a stunning wedding gown. Of course a princess like Cinderella had a matching tiara to go along with her wedding gown and I decided I had to try and recreate this one. The great thing about this tiara is that it is pretty simple and very light weight to wear! Perfect for a day out at Disneyland!

What you need:

• Wire headband
• Gold wire (I used a thick, but still bendable jewelry wire)
• Needle nose pliers and wire cutters
• Hot glue gun and E6000 glue
• Small paper flowers or flower appliques
• White paint
• Gold seal wax
• Lighter or match
• Crystals or rhinestones

How to make your tiara:

1. Lay your headband down flat on a piece of paper or something that you don’t mind getting glue all over.
2. I started by looking at reference photos from the movie and started bending and cutting the gold wire into swirl patterns of all different sizes. I laid them out on top of my headband as I went to see how they fit. It’s like a puzzle of wire, just play around with it until you like how the shape looks.
3. As you are cutting and placing don’t forget to curl the ends under with your needle nose pliers so you don’t stab yourself/others. Unless this is for Halloween, then by all means leave those ends sharp and pointy!
4. Gluing your wire to your headband base gets a little tricky. Start with the largest pieces first and work your way from the middle to the outside, building as you go. It is much easier to hot glue your pieces down flat and rip of the paper that sticks later. Much easier than trying to do it in the air!
5. Once you have most of your large supporting pieces secured to the headband you can start adding your smaller swirl pieces with E6000. Go back over the large pieces with E6000 as well. Use more than you think is necessary, those wire pieces need support if they are going to stand up! (PS the glued side will be the back side of the tiara, so don’t worry if your gluing gets a little messy!)
6. Let the glue dry and cure for a full 24 hours before attempting to peel the tiara off your workspace paper. Even with all the glue this tiara is still very fragile, handle with care when peeling off from the paper!
7. Turn your tiara over to the “good side” and start adding your flowers. I originally got paper flowers but decided they were too large so I deconstructed them by taking the petals apart, rolling them up and painting them with a little white paint to make them look more like they do in the movie. You will want to make 3 different sizes of flowers in 3 different colors. You can come up with your own color scheme or stick to the movie where the colors are pink, yellow and blue.
8. Before you glue your flowers down lay them out flat on your tiara to decide how they are placed. Then, attach with hot glue. Hot glue dries much faster than E6000 which works better when we are attaching things to thin wire.
9. To cover up the glue on the back of the tiara and make it look like welded metal I melted the gold seal wax on all the “joints” that I glued. Be careful when melting your wax, I almost set my crown on fire about 3 times!) Carefully drip the wax on the back of all your flowers and the base of the tiara. Slow and steady is key here, you can’t easily wipe the wax off of the beautiful handmade flowers you just made so be careful to get it just on the backs.
10. Add sparkle! I used tiny Swarovski crystals in the AB color and pink on all the flower petals and some of the wire to make it really sparkle.

We can’t all have fairy godmothers and glass slippers but at least we can all have tiara’s that might make you feel a little more like a princess!