How to make felt wings

skyfishcosplay:

You can make angel wings in a lot of ways and this is how I made a pair out of felt for my latest cosplay. This technique is fairly simple but takes a lot of time.

I started by drawing the shape of one wing on a piece of paper (One wing was for me around 33x26 cm). It is a good idea to also draw out how you want the feathers to be on the paper wing so you can get a hint on how big they should be.

For the feathers I used white hobby felt that I cut out in to six different sizes. This step is by far the most time consuming (it take a lot of time!) and I highly recommend making a pattern of the feathers in cardboard to make the process easier. I made around 600 feathers in total to cover back and front on both wings.

To make the feathers more stiff it is a good idea to coat them with mod podge. Just one coat makes a lot of difference and help the wings keep its shape. (I did not do this step with the smallest feathers since they did not need to be stiff).

To see how I wanted the formation of the feathers I placed them out on the paper wing and took a photo so I could check it later on.

For the base of the wings I cut out the shape of the wing in craft foam. Since I wanted the small feathers on the upper part of the wings to be a bit higher up I glued on some extra craft foam there.  

To hold the base up I used some black worbla that I twisted the lower part of to give them some angle so they didn’t lay flat. To make sure no color show between the feathers everything was painted white and a stripe of felt was glued over the worbla.

Next I started to glue the first row of feathers to each other. Since I did not want to glue them direcly on the foam wing yet I used needles to help mark the placement of the feathers on the next couple of layers.

When I was done gluing the bigger feathers together I took the foam base away and used some transparent paper to draw out the shape of all the feathers except the first row.

I then placed the paper over the foam base and made dots where the inner corners where the feathers on the lower row met. I then draw a line above it and cut along it. This was made because I realised that the felt feathers where a bit see through and the shape of the foam base could be seen. Higher up it were more feathers and harder to see it.

The base was glued to the feathers and was then flipped over and feathers where glued to that side as well.

For my cosplay I needed red stones on the wings. I used two glass prism, black worbla and some red and gold paint to make them. However this made the wings heavier then they needed to be so if you are making something like this, try to use a lighter material for this part.

And they are done! Time consuming but really light (even with the stones) and easy to make.

~Bubblefish