Tutorial: Create a Mermaid Crown and Wrist Ribbons

Mermaid Crown

Who wouldn’t want to be as graceful as a beautiful mermaid or noble merman, living in an underwater wonderland? This play costume—a mermaid crown and wrist ribbons—is something you can create in stages, or do only the part you like best. Mermen might prefer just the crown, without the veil. The wrist ribbons encourage so much imaginative play for boys and girls alike. They can be water flowing while your merfolk swim. They can be magical water powers made visible.

Materials for Mermaid Crown

  • a craft-foam visor
  • jewels, beads, and/or small seashells (Tip: look for packages of jewels and rhinestones for decorating flip flop sandals! Craft stores have inexpensive kits.)
  • low temperature glue gun and glue sticks
  • ½ yard of veil fabric (tulle, netting, etc.)
  • scissors, sewing pins, hand-sewing needle and thread
  • sewing machine
  • notions and ribbons

Materials for Mermaid Wrist Ribbons

  • ¼ yard satin or acetate fabric
  • ½ inch wide elastic
  • notions and ribbons

Materials

Make Your Mermaid Crown

Begin by gathering your materials. You will need a clean, flat surface to work on. First, remove the elastic or plastic coil that is the back of your foam visor. You will put it back on later.

Now decide how you want your headdress to look. Will it have points like a queen’s crown? Will it be scalloped like a seashell? Turn your craft-foam visor over and sketch the shape you want. When you’re happy with what you see, cut your foam with scissors.

Cut the Visor into a Crown Shape

Now play with your notions and jewels, beads, and/or shells, placing them on the visor here and there, until you have an idea how you want them to be arranged. Take some time with this part because once you glue the items to your visor, it will be hard to remove them if you change your mind about their placement.

Adding Fringe

With your low-temp glue gun, glue on any trim (such as in this photo) and your decorations.

Gluing on Gems
It’s a good idea to measure to find the visor’s center. Try to arrange your biggest, most impressive or most special decorative item in the very center.

Using your glue gun and the smallest drops of glue, begin by gluing the special center item. Other smaller jewels or seashells can then be glued on. If your design is symmetrical, do the same item on both sides before moving on to a different jewel. You’ll have to pull off the strings of glue that may result from gluing on the jewels.

Have you decided to make a veil for your mermaid crown? (If you’re making this for a boy to play a merman, you may wish to skip this part.) Take your veil material (tulle, netting, etc.) and fold it in half so that it has two layers. You might measure your child to decide how long you want the veil to be. I decided I wanted the top layer of the veil to be shorter than the bottom layer. (Depending on the fabric you chose, you may wish to hem the bottom edges of your veil.) Pin the layers in place and then sew a seam about 1 inch from the top fold. This creates a tube through which you can pull the visor’s back elastic or plastic coil.

Mermaid Crown Back

Measure the visor on the head of your child, and shorten the elastic or plastic coil accordingly, so that it fits. (The coil on my visor is visible in the photo above.) You might wish to glue this part onto the visor so that it’s permanently attached. This spot, where the crown attaches to the back can be decorated with another jewel if you wish (see below at the child’s temple).

Mermaid Crown Detail

If you have ribbons or notions for decoration or long mermaid locks, fold them in half and with a needle and thread, sew them on to the corner of your veil, where the elastic attaches to the visor, so that they are firmly attached and can trail either in front of the shoulder or behind like hair. Keep in mind the age of the child who will wear this costume. The more decorations you add, the harder it will be for the child to put the crown on herself. (I ended up not using several items that are in the photo at the beginning of the tutorial.)

Congratulations! You’ve made a beautiful headdress for a lucky mermaid, or a handsome crown for a merman.

Sew Your Mermaid Wrist Ribbons

Wrist ribbons are a huge part of dress-up play in our home. You might be surprised at how well your child takes to these simple accessories. There is a bit of sewing involved, but it’s pretty easy.

The first step is to measure your child’s wrist using the elastic. You want the elastic band to be snug enough not to fall off the wrist, but not too snug as to feel tight. You also want to have about a 1 inch overlap, so that you can sew the elastic securely closed.

Now that you know how long it needs to be, cut two pieces of elastic that length. Lay out your covering fabric (satin or acetate). You could be very careful and measure this, but you don’t really need to do so. The object is to cut two strips of fabric so that they are twice as long as your elastic pieces and about 2 ½ inches wide. Turn in ¼ inch on both sides of your fabric strip and the ends and iron it flat. Sew the flat rectangle’s ends together to make a ring. Now fold your wide ring in half to make a long skinny ring with the right side of the fabric out. Make sure the width of your skinny ring will accommodate your elastic, but don’t actually put the elastic into the ring yet.

Sewing the Wristband

Top sew along the very edge of the long skinny ring to make a skinny tube. Don’t sew the ring completely closed. Leave an opening of a few inches so that you can insert your elastic.

Insert the Elastic

With a safety pin on one end of the elastic, insert your elastic into your skinny tube of fabric. Bunch up the tube and join the ends of your elastic together with the appropriate overlap. Sew the elastic ring securely with a good zigzag stitch. You don’t want the elastic ring to pull apart when the child is putting the band around his or her wrist. At this point you have what looks like a hair scrunchie with a small opening in the side.

Gather up your ribbons that will be trailing and, with a few stitches, tack them all together at one end. I used the same notions as on the mermaid headdress, but you can use any ribbon. Consider painting some white satin ribbon with watercolors to create a watery effect.

Painted Ribbon

Now, insert the tacked end of your trailing ribbons into the hole of your ring and pin them in place.

Wrist Ribbon Detail

By hand, with needle and thread, sew the ribbons in place to the elastic and sew the satin ring closed around them. I simply whip-stitched the opening closed and sewed the ribbons in firmly.

Finished Wrist Ribbons

Repeat all the steps so that you have two wrist ribbons.

Finished Wrist Ribbons

If the ends of your ribbons want to fray, you can sometimes use a match and carefully melt the fibers at the ribbon ends to seal them. I suggest you first test this out on a ribbon scrap before you try to melt the ends of your finished wrist ribbons. You don’t want to harm your creation.

Now all you need to complete your mermaid or merman costume is a play silk tied around the child’s waist for a tail!

Merboy and Mermaid

You might be surprised at how your child uses these costume pieces. Perhaps the headdress or crown and the wrist ribbons you make will be used all together, or in different ways at different times. In this final photo, you can see that my son and his friend felt like using some of them at that moment, and found plenty of extra accessories (sword, goggles, pan pipes, cape) to transform themselves into a happy merfolk couple!

Happy sewing!

Mermaid Aquarium Tutorial

Mermaid Aquarium Finished

Have you ever wished that a mermaid would visit your home and be your best friend? You might get your wish, if you set up the perfect place for her to stay: a mermaid aquarium in your home or school! This is a simple project that older children can create by themselves or with a little help from you, and which may truly enchant younger children. While you’re assembling your mermaid aquarium, dream up some stories that feature your mermaid friend. With your mermaid visitor beside your child’s bed, tell mermaid bedtime stories.

Mermaid Aquarium materials

Materials

  • beeswax (color choice is up to you; I used blue, green and flesh colors for my mermaid)
  • wool roving (any color you like works for mermaid hair)
  • fishing line or thread
  • straight sewing pins
  • a large, clear-glass vase (a gold-fish bowl or small aquarium would also work very well)
  • seashells
  • found beach glass, beach pebbles, or glass gems from the craft store
  • a plastic aquarium plant (if your container is very large, you might want two of these)
  • water

Begin by gathering your materials together. This is a nice project to do outdoors, especially since you may spill some water, so craft outside and enjoy the fresh air. If you don’t have a plastic aquarium plant or would rather use a natural material, you can wet-felt or needle-felt some seaweed out of wool. There are many kinds of seaweed, so any shape of plant will do nicely.

Mermaid out of Beeswax

Model Your Mermaid

Your first task is to fashion your mermaid out of beeswax. Mermaids (and mermen) come in many different colors. Your child may have an idea of how this mermaid should look. If the beeswax is hard to mold, consider dipping it in warm water for a few minutes, or let the heat from your hands and breath soften it. Younger children find this very helpful when working with beeswax. Start by making the mermaid’s tail first, then create the mermaid’s upper body and arms. Finally, add on her head, making sure to let the wax from the body join the wax of the head. Your mermaid probably looks funny at this point. Mermaids are known for their gorgeous hair, right?

Use a shock of wool roving of any color you like and arrange it on your mermaid’s head to look like her luxurious locks. (You might want to do this next part out of the sight of younger children.) Now carefully take a few sewing straight pins and pin the wool hair to the mermaid’s head by aiming the pin down through her head and into her upper body. If you are careful, you can arrange the pins so that they look like hair decorations or a crown. Since children may be handling the mermaid, make sure the pins don’t stick out from her body to poke someone. Fortunately, if a pin’s tip emerges, you can just back it out and try again. The beeswax easily “heals”  if you rub out the hole. Perhaps the children would like to give the mermaid a name now.

IMG_2373

Assemble the Mermaid Aquarium

Now that your lovely mermaid is done, you can begin to assemble her underwater home. Fill the glass jar about a third of the way full with beach glass, pebbles, or glass gems. Your child may already have such treasures in his or her special collection, and may wish to contribute to the mermaid’s home. Consider adding seashells you have gathered from the shore (after you rinse them well). Real seashells will help your mermaid friend feel at home. Even the youngest children can easily add these special items to your vase.

Beeswax Mermaid

Be Thankful

Talk about where these treasures from the sea came from. Thank Mama Ocean for being the home to such amazing shelled creatures, and for wearing down the pebbles until they are smooth as silk. Sing a mermaid song.

Your aquarium is beginning to look inviting, isn‘t it?

Mermaid Aquarium in progress

The Tricky Part: Beeswax Floats

Now comes the only challenging part. Your beeswax mermaid at first wants to float on top of the water, but we know she will be more at home under the water. Take a small length of fishing line or thread and gently tie your mermaid to your plastic aquarium plant, or to a heavy seashell. We tried doing both, and found we were happiest with how she looked when anchored to the heavy shell. If you tie your mermaid to the plant, now is the time to plant the base of the plant into your pebbles or gems so that the plant looks like it’s growing there at the base of the aquarium. If you opt to tie your mermaid to a heavy shell, place your plant first, then add the shell and mermaid to the aquarium last. You probably won’t be able to see the fishing line or thread.

In thes photo above, it looks like our mermaid is swimming. In the next photo, she is resting atop a seashell. Feel free to move the objects around until you achieve a scene that you like.

IMG_2397

Enjoy Your Mermaid Visitor

Now place your mermaid aquarium on your summer nature table or at a child’s bedside. Arrange other beach treasures around her on an ocean-like silk. It will help her feel at home! If you tell a few mermaid stories, your child may become enchanted by the mermaid guest and may whisper secrets to her during the long twilight of summer evenings.
Perhaps the mermaid will tell the children stories of her life in the sea, the beautiful underwater merfolk cities, her fish friends, and water magic. Perhaps, if you‘re very lucky, the children will tell you these stories, too.

Please note: Your child may wish to touch the water and play with the mermaid, so your placement of the mermaid’s aquarium home may depend on whether spills are a problem. Also, if your mermaid visits for a long time, you may need to change the water to keep it looking clear. In doing so, you may need rinse the gems, pebbles, and shells. But then, you and the children get to remake it all over again!

 

  • About Sara

    Thanks for visiting! I’m Sara, editor and writer, wife to Ian, and mother of two precious boys. I am living each day to the fullest and with as much grace, creativity, and patience as I can muster. This is where I write about living, loving, and engaging fully in family life and the world around me. I let my hair down here. I learn new skills here. I strive to be a better human being here. And I tell the truth.

    Our children attend Waldorf school and we are enriching our home and family life with plenty of Waldorf-inspired festivals, crafts, and stories.

    © 2003–2018 Please do not use my photographs or text without my permission.

    “Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” —Ursula K. LeGuinn

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