Padmé Costume- Hairnets and Headband

The beginning of a hairnet- crocheted strands made with a grid pattern

An almost-complete hairnet

What it looked like off the grid

A fully complete hairnet

The ribbon I used for my first headband

Three ribbons hand-stitched together

My first headband

My second headband- more accurate

So this post is about the hairnets and headband, which I made in April 2015 or something. I knew better than to start the blog about it way back then because, first of all, I wasn’t sure if I would ever actually finish the costume, and second of all, I knew it would take a really long time. Which it did. I didn’t finish until early September 2015, and that was when costuming was my WHOLE LIFE for all of August… but that’s another story…

Anyway. After reading a lot about the costume online, one day at JoAnn’s I picked up my headband and hairnet supplies. In the section where you can find embroidery floss, I picked up 3 of those really big embroidery floss rolls. There were only two colors, gold and silver, so I just got the gold one. (Which in retrospect was not a costume accurate choice AT ALL. The color didn’t match the real color one bit.) It wasn’t the worst, but more of a greenish gold instead of an orangey gold like the real hairnets. I also picked up a small crochet hook when I was there. It is…. *runs off to find crochet hook* Aha. 2.25mm. A pretty small thing, and it did work well for what I was doing.

(A weird note about me: In sewing, I don’t use patterns. I just don’t. I start with basic shapes and do some math and some measuring and cutting and some going insane… you’ll see soon.)

For the construction of the hairnets, I started with a circle shape, since I figured a hairnet is a circle with the edges tightened. So, I used my trusty seamstress tape measure to find out roughly how long the diameter had to be- from where the bottom of the hairnet should be and where the top should be. Then I cut out a circle on paper to use as a pattern, and then I drew a grid on it. After that, I started to crochet lines and pin them to the edges of the circle, and once I got multiple lines that intersected I crocheted them together as I went. (My mom taught me how to crochet when I was like 7, so I didn’t use an online reference to learn how to do it. It’s pretty easy though. Explaining why I as a nerdy little 7-year-old could do it.) Anyway, after I had filled in the whole circle with the grid I crocheted around the edges of the circle. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. After that came the tricky part. I had to turn it into an elastic hairnet, not just a circular doily sort of thing. So, lucky for me I happened to have some clear stretchy plastic jewelry cord left over from my jewelry making days as a kid. (Sounds like the 60’s Batman who always conveniently has whatever gadget he needs, right?) I cut some of the cord to the final length I wanted it to have, plus a little extra. Then I just kind of wove it through the edge and hot glued the edges of the cord together where they met. And voila! It was finally a hairnet, and even though the edge was fragile it could stretch a little bit.

As for the ribbon, I eventually ended up replacing it with a much better version after I got the WalMart curtain and stuff. (This will all be discussed in the shawl/cape post.) But I thought I would talk about the old ribbon just because I put so much time into it! I looked around online a lot for a good movie accurate version. This is what the real ribbon looks like, and Padawan’s Guide had some places they recommended, but Padawan’s Guide hasn’t been updated in a long time, so most of the places were either out of business or didn’t have the right ribbon. So I went about things the cheap way…. I bought this ribbon from JoAnn’s, pictured above. The color is not right, but it was “close enough.” Never again did I settle for “close enough.” >.< As you can see, the middle of the ribbon is sheer, so I cut three lengths and stitched them together, as seen above.

After that I did some really terrible embroidery that didn’t look anything like the actual embroidery. Wrong colors, way-too-small flowers, etc. The sad thing is, it took forever, too. Above, the end result is pictured.

My later ribbon came out much better, as seen above. I’ll talk about that in the shawl/cape post.