Tribal Princess

I enjoy doing costumes and what more to help a friend.  Irene was to make her own hair accessories for her tribal belly dance costume.  And, I quickly jumped at the chance to help put this together.

Irene showed me some pictures of how her hair piece was supposed to look like.  And with those crafting stuff she bought, we were soon on the way ...

There were basically a lot of synthetic braided hair that came in a spool; in black & in brown.  We cut them up to varying length of approximately 16" long.  We tied the braids along a comb headband.

At first, we just opened up the braids to have the loose ends, like long flowing waves.  Later we figured that the black was too black, and the brown was too brown; meaning it looked very (ironically) unnatural.  

So, we opened up the whole length of the braids and mixed up the strands and re-braided them.  Notice the ones on the left against the ones on the right.  It looked better with the blend.  We finished the braids with beads & shells.

The other embellishments, like shells, colored cords & feathers, were added later along the top of the braids.

You would noticed that the comb hairband was worn horizontally along the back, and not on top of her head, like hair extensions.

We continued adding braids and embellishments to cover the whole headband (left to right).

Here, finished and tested out on Irene's hair.  We did a quick hair bun & wrapped the rest the feathers around it, too.  Other versions we saw included flowers too.