SCA: Venetian Fan Makeover

Approximately 2 billion years ago, I made myself a little paper hand fan/face screen to go with my Italian outfits. I loved it…but it got loved to pieces. 

The paper is bent, tearing, fuzzy around the edges. The design, drawn in sharpie marker, is faded and crappy looking. The stick - a dowel with hot glue wrapped around it to simulate a turned piece of wood - was chipping off paint. Time to redo this thing. 

I spray painted the stick black, and then dry brushed on a couple of coats of brown and tan, to recreate the wood look. I sprayed it with Polycrylic after that, to protect the finish. 

For the flag, I cut a couple of pieces of damask-print scrapbook paper and glued them together back to back. Then I painted the edges and over some of the detail in the print with gold leaf paint, and attached the fan to the stick with embroidery floss coated in Mod Podge, like I did the first time. 

Brand new fan!  It matches exactly nothing I’m going to be wearing at Baronial, but I don’t care. All my other stuff is blue, this can be blue, too. 

Inspiration pics: 

Italian fans, 1500s

French face screen, 1600s

Woman In White, Titian, 1561

My Fandom Is Made of Hot Glue and Paper

Apologies for the lack of posts recently;  I've been having issues with Blogger and Dropbox not speaking to each other.  I think I have it fixed, though...



So, you know all those pins on Pinterest you think you're going to make and then you really do?  And those ones you see and HAVE to jump up and do right away, and then you do, and it's awesome?

Yeah, me neither.

Except for this time.  I was bopping around on Pinterest (coincidentally, waiting for the glue to dry on another project, and wondering what to do in the meantime), when I came across the tutorial for the Harry Potter wands made from chopsticks and hot glue for the hundredth time.   And for the hundredth time, it was adorable, and I really wanted to make it, but I'm not into Harry Potter enough to make one for myself, and I don't have kids.

But then I remembered this:

16thC Venetian fans; one parchment and one plant fiber

And my brain did about fourteen double-takes.   I searched high and low for a chopstick, a hair stick, pencils (too short), anything - then I remembered that I had about a frillion wooden dowels in the garage, in different sizes.

I grabbed one, and chopped it to length with a bolt cutter (it was out on the work bench), and sanded the end smooth.

And then I hot-glued the crap out of it:

Later, I spray painted it black, and then wood-grained it with various brown and yellow paints.  Lastly, I had to try to figure out how to make the fan part.  In the end, I went with a thick watercolor art paper just inked and hand-colored (mostly with Sharpie marker, actually):

(apologies for the photo quality;  I'm using my phone again until I get whatever #%^!# is wrong with my
camera now fixed)  

Yup, that's my device.  The shield, not the border stuff.
I laced the paper onto the stick of the fan with fake sinew; then applied a line of
glue over the lacing for extra insurance against ripping and slipping.  

.