In October, The Footwork & Frolick Society hosted a fairytale themed late 19th century ball. I wanted to wear something fun from my historical wardrobe that I hadn’t worn in awhile and decided on my 1899 Elusive Blue dress. Once the outfit was decided on I had to figure out how that might fit the theme!

After a bit of thinking, I decided on a Snow Queen idea, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s character and story. The idea of a light blue, white, and silver dress seemed like it could be adapted to fit my chosen outfit with minimal additions.

One of the essential accessories I wanted was an icicle crown! I’ve successfully made icicles using Worbla’s TranspArt product (a thermoplastic that can be heated, shaped, and then allowed to cool to become rigid), but I didn’t have any of this on hand. I wondered if I could use plastic grocery clamshells for a similar effect… and make use of my recycling in the process!

Spoiler: I was successful! But I don’t want to detract from Worbla’s products. They are much easier to use and more forgivable — easily flexing in all directions as well as easier to reshape and tweak. The clamshells only wanted to flex in a limited directions and were a bit fussy to tweak once I had the basic shapes made.

But this story is a transformation, from this:

To this:

Icicle Methods

Once I had this idea, I spent a month or so saving plastic produce clamshell packaging from my everyday groceries: stone fruit, tomatoes, grapes, etc. If they had too many labels or not many mostly flat spaces they didn’t make the cut. But even with these guidelines, I accumulated quite a number of packages I could use for this project.

I started by cutting rough rounded triangles out of the clamshells I collected. The first two I tried using an area that was all plastic and one that had a label on it, just to see how they would behave and what they would look like.

I started by heating the plastic with a hair dryer (outside, for ventilation, and on a sturdy scrap piece of plywood that wouldn’t melt). The hair dryer was not powerful enough to warp the plastic, so I next tried a heat gun. I used an oven mitt to protect the hand holding the plastic. I found that medium heat from the heat gun worked well! My first two samples are below.

The one with the label looked not like an icicle and didn’t really want to shape well, so I ruled out that idea. But the all plastic one actually worked pretty well! After asking what I was up to, Mr. Q was not impressed and thought that this idea would not work… But I carried on. I cut more rough triangles in a few different lengths and shaped them with my heat gun. The flat shape and twisted icicles are pictured below.

I decided I wanted five of them — a tall one in the center and slightly shorter ones to either side. I picked the best out of the 8 or so that I made and arranged them. That led me to go back and adjust a few to get better shapes. It was no problem to shape them with scissors or reheat them to change the shapes. I also softened the bottom of the chosen 5 icicles to flatten them out a bit to provide a way to have them stand up and attach to a base, as you can see below.

Crown Base

For a base of support, I pulled out my buckram scraps. I layered two of them and stitched them together around the edges. Then, I covered the buckram with scraps of two layers of silver fabric — a polyester satin and silver net. Below is a photo showing the underside of the buckram. My stitches are big, rough, and messy. They will be covered later.

The top of the crown base can be seen below. The silver fabric looks a bit like tinfoil. It was a bit shiny on its own, but made sense once the whole crown was complete.

Attaching The Icicles

Next, it was time to attach the icicles! I tried using the needle that I would normally use to sew, but it was a bit too weak to push through the plastic easily. I went to my needle stash and found a much larger (in length and diameter) sharp needle and used that to punch holes in the icicle bases that I could then easily sew through to secure the icicles to the crown base. This can be seen in the photo below.

Then, I sewed through the holes and the buckram base to secure the icicles in place. The underside of the crown is below. The grey thread I used isn’t really visible on the silver fabric covering.

You can see what the crown looks like from the top in the photo below. The stitches are completely hidden by the shine of the fabric and plastic.

The last step was to cover up all of my stitching with a nicely whipped backing of black felt. This not only makes the whole thing super tidy, but also provides some friction to help the crown stay in place on my hair. I added a few loops to the felt, as well, so that I would have something easy to bobby pin (and not have dark bobby pins showing on the silver fabric side). Below, a much tidier bottom of the crown!

I’m proud to say that Mr. Q said the finished product does, in fact, look like icicles despite his lack of confidence along the way about my clamshell idea! That sounds like a confidence problem on his part to me, amusingly, but nevertheless I’m pleased for the positive opinion!

Photos of the finished Snow Queen ensemble will be coming in a future post!