Buns and Plaits with accessories - Practical

After learning how to create different buns and plaits, we started looking at making it slightly more detailed and we looked at some accessories to add to the hair. Typically, many wealthy Elizabethan women would wear objects in their hair such as pearls, ribbons and pendants, Queen Elizabeth especially liked to wear pearls in her hair as it made her feel pure and virgin like.

For the hairstyle, I created a padded front with the front of the hair being curled backwards so it looked like the hair had padding in it. At the back of the hair, I created a plait bun by firstly placing the hair in a ponytail on the crown of the head and braiding it. The next step was to leave the top half of the hair just a normal plait and then twist the bottom to create a small plaited bun. When I was plaiting the hair, I added a ribbon to it to give it more detail, I chose a red one as I thought this represented power a lot and would look more wealthy than another colour (although black represents power too, I think a black ribbon would look too dark against the hair). I then added to the hair design with two small fish plaits on either side of the head and then clipped back in a half circle shape and the last bit of the detail I added was a string of pearls in-between the padded front and the start of the plait.

These images show the final design which shows the padded front, the plait and plaited bun with the ribbon threaded through, the small fish plaits on either side and the white pearls.

You can see the fish plait close up below, I clipped this down with a small hair grip and tried to cover it as much as possible with the pearls. I also clipped the ribbon underneath the bun.

I found some difficulties whilst creating this hair piece, I found it quite hard at first to include the ribbon into the hair style as it wouldn't stay in when I clipped it to the hair at the top and it was also hard to hide the clip underneath the bun. I also found it difficult to hide the clip at the end of the fish plait. I found the rest of the style fairly easy to complete and I enjoyed creating it. I know what parts I could improve and work on to make this style better for next time.