This post is about how I made the Tinkerbell wings for the dog costume. I wanted to try making wings for myself, but figured dog wings were a good place to start. These were inspired by a pair of wings from Fancy Fairy Wings & Things. Her wings are gorgeous and if you want wings, I highly recommend hers for both beauty and quality. She’s also got tutorials up about how to make wings. This pair was made before she posted her tutorials, but her tutorials are great and I wish I’d had them back then as these probably would have turned out better. I do still have plans to follow her tutorials to make a set of wings and will post when I do.
But back to these . . .
The first step was creating the vector file fo the wing shape. I looked at some photos of Tinkerbell and her wings and did my best to create a similar design. It had to be simplified a bit to deal with the minimum laser cutting size. I looked at getting this cut out of metal which would have been thinner and sturdier than the acrylic but it was super expensive (not worth it for a dog costume) so I decided laser cutting out of acrylic for free at work was the next best thing.
Those are the final wing skeletons after removing the paper backing. I was able to get a side out of each piece of 12” x 24″ acrylic.
Next was creating the diaphanous part of the wing. My plan based on scouring the internet for pictures and ideas was to sandwich the wing skeleton between self-adhesive laminating sheet (I used this one) and shimmery cellophane. So I laid the skeleton on the sticky sheet first.
Then I rolled the cellophane over it. This sorta worked well. The acrylic was so thick that it kinda didn’t stick except at the edges.
So I took a heat gun and attempted to get it to sticker together a bit. It sorta worked. The first time I tested this it, it melted the cellophane so I was very light with the heat gun.
I’m very happy with how they turned out and thought they looked very tiny Tinkerbell.
That being said, they did not survive being worn very well. Dogs can be a bit hard on costumes. This was actually right before the photoshoot when I was just trying them on for size and then I had to tape them together which is what you see in the first photo. So . . . next time we’ll need to reinforce them. But they served their purpose well.
