DIY African Juju Hat

A few weeks ago I bought a new lounge. The new lounge meant that I had a new desire to redo the living room. Although we have renovated our home, the lounge/living area was not an area we had done much to other than paint, install new blinds and flooring. I was not in love with. It is an area that I spend alot of time and I wanted to love it. My new lounge was grey, so I started pinning lots of grey inspiration and wrote this post about 50 shades of grey. I also mentioned that I had an obsession with African juju hats and really wanted to try a DIY attempt. I found them to be $400 - $600 in stores and worked out doing a DIY lookalike would cost a fraction of the cost. So I spent a month talking about it alot, convincing Hubby that a pile of feathers stuck together on the wall would look great in our new living room redo and then went about buying the feathers. They arrived in the post one Friday afternoon, then on the Saturday morning I woke to rain and no sunshine. It was a perfect excuse to stay indoors and do some DIY crafts.

Last month I posted here on Instagram asking what others thought and if they had tried a DIY African juju hat version themselves. Katrina Chambers put her hand up and mentioned she had a tutorial, which you can view here and then I found some other tutorial inspiration here and here.

So this is what I came up with, this is my DIY African Juju hat attempt (and a pretty successful one too!).

I wanted the overall size to be around 50cm wide when hung on the wall, so I purchased a cake backing board that was 35cm. I worked out I would need 3.5m of feathers to therefore cover this area and I was spot on (lucky, would have been very disappointed to get halfway through and run out of feathers!). If you want yours to be bigger you would therefore need to allow more feathers. 

| | What you need | |

+ 3.5m of rooster coque feathers on a ribbon/string. I purchased mine here for a cost of $82. I found these to be the best value.

+ a backing board. I used a cake board, which I purchased for $2 from a discount store.

+ hot glue gun and plenty of glue gun refills.

+ scissors

As I already had a hot glue gun, the total cost was $85. 

||Step One ||

Lay your backing board on a flat surface. Start approx 1 cm in from the edge of your backing board and run a line of hot glue around the round perimeter. Quickly fasten the ribbon trim to the glue and press firmly to fasten. Keep gluing until a full circle has been complete around the perimeter.

||Step Two ||

Approx 3cm in from the last line of feathers, you will repeat step one, gluing another line of feathers in complete full circle.  I used the measurement of 3cm, however you adjust yours dependent on the size of the backing board and how many feathers you have available. I found 3cm worked best for me, as the bulk of the feathers covered the prior layer and you could not see the ribbon trim. The idea is to cover the ribbon trim.

||Step Three ||

Continue gluing your feathers in rows until you have reached the middle of the circle.

** I do apologise that there are not more progress photos here, the glue was kinda hot and sticky and my camera was not a fan :P

||Step Four ||

When you reach the center of the juju the ribbon trim will be obvious. At this point I added some loose feathers at various angles to the middle, fastening them with glue. The aim here is to conceal the ribbon trim and make it look seamless. 

There you have it - voila! All you need to do now is fasten a hook to the rear of the backing. I hot glue gunned a little plastic hook for me to hang it with. You want something quite flat so it doesn't sit too far off the wall.

I took a few photos, but Mr Coopar was intent on photo bombing and wouldn't budge. Pretty cute huh?

Now it sitting pretty on the wall it is making me love my living room more & more! There is a few more touches and things I want to do, but for now I am going to sit back and enjoy my DIY masterpiece!

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK? 

I hope I have ignited a desire for you to DIY too! I'd love to know if you have made one or if you are going to try a DIY version, be sure to let me know! 


PS: Do you have trouble taking photos and having photo bombing animals too?

PSS: Did you get a peek of the new lounge? I am in love with it, I love that you can move the head rest and arm rests. It's like a 'his & hers' lounge, you can adjust to suit. I will post more of my living room makeover and new lounges next week! 

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