In Philosopher's Stone Harry, Ron and Hermione have to get through a room of angry, winged keys to try and prevent the stealing of the actual Philosopher's Stone. I thought Winged Keys would make beautiful ornaments for my daughter's Harry Potter themed Christmas tree, and decided to make her some.
On eBay, I found these antique-looking silver keys (please note that links may expire with time, and that they will not be fixed or updated), that I thought would be great. I spent a great deal of time on figuring out how to make the prettiest wings for these gorgeous keys, and during my search I discovered a product called Angelina Film. It is a transparent, heat bondable film that comes in many iridescent colours, and by googling Angelina Film and fairy wings I found lots of inspiration on YouTube. So I ordered a few different colours from the Embellishment Village over in the US of A. But I wasn't too keen on using wire frames with my Angelina Film, as so many of the YouTubers do, because that would be very tedious and time consuming work considering the wings would have to be quite small, and there are 20 keys in the package! So I opted for what I thought would be a quicker and easier way.
It took quite a bit of searching, but over at My Little Customs I finally found something that I thought I could work with. I downloaded their Iridescent Transparency/Acetate Wing Tutorial PDF, and used that as my inspiration. Over at a blog called The Sum of All Crafts by Valerie Brincheck, I found printable fairy wings templates. The blog is full of fantastic crafts, but unfortunately it isn't updated anymore. I modified and resized some of these and a few other templates I found online and paired them so I wouldn't have to make that wire-arrangement in the middle to hold the wings together like in the tutorial (for these particular keys I made wing pairs 6-7cm across). I printed several of them on printer compatible A4 transparent film. Then I started trying and failing to fuse the printed wing templates with the iridescent Angelina Film, because I thought I could do it without the spray glue they use in the tutorial I downloaded.
The Angelia Film is supposed to be heat bondable, so naturally I tried ironing first. That didn't turn out pretty, and it didn't stick the film properly to the transparent either. Next I tried Mod Podge. That never dried, and when it finally did, the Angelina Film fell right off. That's when I realised I'd have to get some spray glue, and bought some from an auto parts place because that was the cheapest spray glue I could find. Big mistake! That spray glue looked exactly like snot when it came out of the can, colour and all, a complete waste. I ended up having to buy some ridikkulously expensive transparent spray glue in a Norwegian craft store, because I had procrastinated the making of these wings for so long that I no longer had time to order some from abroad. Fortunately that did the trick, though!
I cut rectangular sections of four to six wings at a time, matching the size of the Angelina Film, and one by one, secured them to old newspaper pages with a little Spellotape (first I tried without taping, but the spray blew the transparent around and it got glue on both sides - FAIL). It's important to face the side with the ink upwards, as that's the side you want to cover with Angelina Film. I sprayed lightly with glue, and carefully put the iridescent film over the wing template, pressing out air bubbles as I went. It took a few tries to get the real hang of it, and as the Angelina Film was no longer completely smooth (it inevitably got a bit creased from travelling over the Atlantic), I unfortunately had to discard like 40% of the wings that I made. Luckily, though, I'd made almost twice as many as I needed!
Now I just had to cut out each and every wing pair. I tried to varnish one pair with Glitter Mod Podge, I kind of liked the iridescent glitter effect but the shiny smooth quality of the wings was ruined and my husband voted no. With my glue gun I glued a pair of wings to every key. Now it turns out that smooth plastic is very difficult to glue, and in addition to putting glue under the middle of the wing pair, I also had to put a little dot of glue at the edges in order to hold the wings in place as securely as possible. I'm actually counting on some of the wings to fall off at some point sooner or later, good thing they can just be glued back on. I debated on whether to use ornament hooks and hang the keys from the top, or "invisible" fishing line and hang them from the middle making them look like they're flying. Being a sucker for those ornament hooks (and easy slutions), I ended up making 20 swirly, beaded ones, and liked the result very much!
On eBay, I found these antique-looking silver keys (please note that links may expire with time, and that they will not be fixed or updated), that I thought would be great. I spent a great deal of time on figuring out how to make the prettiest wings for these gorgeous keys, and during my search I discovered a product called Angelina Film. It is a transparent, heat bondable film that comes in many iridescent colours, and by googling Angelina Film and fairy wings I found lots of inspiration on YouTube. So I ordered a few different colours from the Embellishment Village over in the US of A. But I wasn't too keen on using wire frames with my Angelina Film, as so many of the YouTubers do, because that would be very tedious and time consuming work considering the wings would have to be quite small, and there are 20 keys in the package! So I opted for what I thought would be a quicker and easier way.
The Angelia Film is supposed to be heat bondable, so naturally I tried ironing first. That didn't turn out pretty, and it didn't stick the film properly to the transparent either. Next I tried Mod Podge. That never dried, and when it finally did, the Angelina Film fell right off. That's when I realised I'd have to get some spray glue, and bought some from an auto parts place because that was the cheapest spray glue I could find. Big mistake! That spray glue looked exactly like snot when it came out of the can, colour and all, a complete waste. I ended up having to buy some ridikkulously expensive transparent spray glue in a Norwegian craft store, because I had procrastinated the making of these wings for so long that I no longer had time to order some from abroad. Fortunately that did the trick, though!
I cut rectangular sections of four to six wings at a time, matching the size of the Angelina Film, and one by one, secured them to old newspaper pages with a little Spellotape (first I tried without taping, but the spray blew the transparent around and it got glue on both sides - FAIL). It's important to face the side with the ink upwards, as that's the side you want to cover with Angelina Film. I sprayed lightly with glue, and carefully put the iridescent film over the wing template, pressing out air bubbles as I went. It took a few tries to get the real hang of it, and as the Angelina Film was no longer completely smooth (it inevitably got a bit creased from travelling over the Atlantic), I unfortunately had to discard like 40% of the wings that I made. Luckily, though, I'd made almost twice as many as I needed!
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