Flamingo Headpiece

fancy dress headwear from garden wire, wadding, felt and a bit of sewing
I needed an excuse to wear my pink dress and so decided to go as a flamingo for a fancy dress party.
I created a freeform wire structure, starting with a spiral to sit on top of the head and then wrapped the wire around the outer rings and took it skyward a few times so that the neck would be fairly strong but still malleable.
I cut and machine stitched a long felt tube with a bulge at the end for the head and tapered the end for the beak. Next- the tricky bit - feeding rolled (and tied like a loin of meat) wadding up the felt tube until the end. (I tied string on the wadding and onto a long piece of stiff wire and tried to pull it up from the beak end. (surely there must be an easier way of doing this? - a knitting needle wouldn't feed the wadding up). I then fed the wire neck into the tube of padded felt.
I then padded the bottom and top of the spiral hat part with some wadding so that it would sit comfortably. I cut the felt to fit the base and on top of the wadding and hand sewed the edges. The strap was made of pink cotton and sewn across the base felt.
The last part of the beak was a bit of cotton cut out into a beak shape, stuffed with some wadding and sewn onto the tip of the felt beak.