Some time after the Panto to be performed in February 2026 had been chosen and before rehearsals started in 2025 I was approached by the director of what is to be our 2027 Panto to give some thought to making headdresses for the villain and her cohorts.

That Panto is to be Goldilocks and the 3 Bears.  Apparently the “baddie” in this version is a Queen bee, and the director is thinking well ahead – which makes a nice change from the usual last minute panic.  Anyway, I set about thinking how best and how cheaply to do this.

But before I got very far I was asked by our wardrobe mistress to make crowns for the King and Queen of Gooseland, for the 2026 Panto, which was to be Mother Goose.  By this time we were well into rehearsal and so I had to stop thinking about bees and start thinking about geese.  The wardrobe mistress wanted crowns that fit around the head rather than “tiara” type that sit on top.  They should be white and should incorporate goose feathers.

We had some white feathers in stock, but none long enough to look like goose feathers, so first of all I would have to make some.  We had, in our initial discussion, thought about how many would be needed.  I was anxious that a fully feathered crown should not make the king look as if he was aping a native American Indian chief wearing a War Bonnet.  We decided that I would make 5 feathers for each crown, taller ones for the king and slightly shorter for the queen.

I used one of my white nonwoven cotton cloths and some black (all I had) plastic rods.  I used an old and well washed cloth, which when ironed stretched and ironed again became paper thin but remained flexible.  I cut 10 strips about 2” wide and 8 or 9 inches long.  Using “washable PVA glue … (yes, I’d never heard of it before either, it was a gift from our odd job man/friend.  According to the lable on the bottle it was a mixture of water, PVA, glycerine, stearic acid and sodium hydroxide) …  as I was saying, using washable PVA glue I stuck 2 lengths of the cloth together, sandwiching a plastic rod part way up the middle – short of the top and protruding from the bottom, so that it represented the quill.  In this way I made 10 basic shapes which I trimmed into feather shapes, and carved 2 or 3 “notches’” randomly in the sides to add to the feather-like appearance.  I painted the black quills white and, to give them extra strength, painted each side of the feathers with more of the PVA.

Then I could consider the design of each crown; the king’s would need to be “manly” and the queen’s elegant.  Having gone through my design source images I chose 2 crowns from the film version of Lord of the Rings on which to base my ideas – Elron’s crown for the Gooseland queen (No he’s not a bloke, he’s an elegant Elf – can’t you see his pointy ears?) and Aragorn’s for the king.

I went through my stash of beads, stones and jewels and picked out items which could adorn either crown – the idea being that although they weren’t identical they would be a pair.  I found a strip of muslin which had pearls and clear beads already attached to it and also some large round green cabochons mounted in “silver” frames.  I painted the stones with several coats of pearl coloured nail varnish and I brightened the frames with a coat of silver nail varnish, and both with a top coat of clear.

[I find nail varnish very useful in making costumes and props, so whenever I see any reduced in price, especially odd colours, or colourless, I snap them up.]

Having obtained approval for my ideas from the director and the wardrobe mistress, I then had to wait some weeks before I received details of the king and queen’s head sizes.  We had a cast of 35 in this Panto, some of whom played more than one character, and there were at least 2 costumes for most of the characters, not to mention 5 or 6 for Mother Goose, the dame.  It is not surprising therefore that our poor wardrobe mistress, who does most of the work herself with the help of a couple of members, took some time to get round to sorting the wigs for the king and queen and measuring their resulting head sizes.  Once I had these I was able to get a gallop on!

I started with the queen’s crown.  I made a drawing based on the Elrond crown and then blew it up to the size needed. I transferred 2 copies of the pattern to the card stock I was going to use, cut them out and, after auditioning the feathers and jewellery as to placement, proceed to decorate one of them.

I’m not keen on using just glue for holding things together, whether on costumes, on props or on actors (I once lost my Polly parrot beak mid performance!)  It’s belt and braces for me, so I sewed the strip of muslin with the pearl and clear beads along one of the sections of the crown, front to back on either side of the centre “V”. I also sewed the feathers to the inside of the crown and I added a shield shape to the back of the centre front to add a bit of strength.  It was as well that I had cut out a second pattern, the stitching of the muslin to the narrow sections of the crown in fact weakened the card.  So I attached the second pattern to the inside of the crown and then added a cut out shape of non-slip mat to the inside front of the crown.  I was concerned that the weight of the stones on the front might cause the crown to slide down the actor’s forehead.  (In the end however I needn’t have bothered as the actor’s coarse and curly wig had a large fringe, on which the crown sat, but again belt and braces I suppose.)  Finally I joined the two ends of the crown with a large hook and eye (the sort covered in fabric and normally used by furriers) painted white.

Then on to the King’s crown.  I had found somewhere on the internet a pattern page of the pieces used to make a version of Aragorn’s crown.

I liked the basic idea of some form of emblem at the front which could hold up the feathers but I didn’t want to use the actual design from Aragorn’s crown – it was too “serious” and the Gooseland King was a comic part – so after trying out various shapes, which would also hold 3 of the cabochon stones, I decided to use a shield shape, with a smaller version at the back and smaller versions still at the two sides.  I decided that I would not use the remainder of the muslin with the pearl and clear beads for the King’s crown (too feminine) so I decided to add a border of yarn around the edges of everything to add a sort of metallic rim as if the metalsmith had added a border of twisted metal, as indicated on the page of pattern pieces. So here I deviated from my glue+ method and just soaked some white yarn in PVA and ran it around the edges of the shields and the bands of the crown.  I did stitch the cabochons to the front shield and also the feathers.  I covered this on the inside with another shield shaped piece of card.  I wasn’t sure how to decorate the two side and the back shields and I wondered if I could find a suitable monogram for Gooseland.  In the end I found, somewhere on line, a drawing of a winged shield, I added a capital G to the centre of that and printed off three copies which I attached to the centre of the 3 blank shields.

Once all the glue was dry I packed them up and delivered the Crowns a couple of days before the first dress rehearsal.

Now I can go back to thinking about bees.