Decorating the wolf hat and I have a cold. (Updated: Patrick had a picture)

I know. After all that planning for Valentine's Day... I have a cold. It's not fair. Oh well. We'll just have to wait to indulge until I'm healthy enough to appreciate it. These things happen.

I decorated my wolf hat last night! This was rather painstaking work. I haven't taken a picture of the contraption I created to decorate it with yet, but I will. We went to Michaels and I got a bunch of beads, some feathers (pheasant, peacock, whatever kind of black ones came with the pheasant), various findings for the connections, a chain, and some wire.

After a couple abortive attempts, I figured out how to make charms to attach to the chain. The article I'd read on making these was done by someone who didn't mind if the charms stuck out a bit, since she threaded the beads on wire and then attached the charm to the chain directly with said wire, instead of involving a ring first. I prefer mine free-swinging, so a ring was necessary.

I wielded pliers like a mildly congested fiend, and after an hour or so I had my decoration. It has a black lobster claw clasp to hook it to the little tag in the right ear (where the riveted hole is), and the chain is kind of a gunmetal color. The wire is also black, although you can't see much of that anyway, as are the little links that connect the charms to the main chain. I think the whole thing is probably a foot and a half long or so, although I'm not sure about the bottom of the last peacock feather. It has the three different kinds of feathers I mentioned and five different types of beads. All of them are natural stone beads, as I was going for a kind of druidy aesthetic, so going for colors actually found in nature.

I'll give you a picture when I'm not quite so sniffly. In the meantime, here's one of me pre-decoration, on the way to the Seattle Aquarium (we enjoyed this outing on Saturday, and it was a lot of fun). We were going to go to the zoo as well, but it was kind of cold and a bit drippy, so we're going to wait til the weather is better.

Yes. That is me giving a thumbs-up. Because that's how I roll. No, this is not a furry suit. It just looks like it in the picture. That tag on the top left is where the decoration will hang.

Hey, Patrick apparently took a picture of my decoration that I forgot about. I'll try to get some with more detail later, but here it is for now: