Queen Cleopatra #2

Life is full of silly coincidences, isn't it?

This week a Facebook quiz told me that the Shakespeare character I most closely resembled was Queen Cleopatra. Now I have actually never read Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra (although it is sitting on a bookshelf less than a metre from me), but I understand that the comparison is, um, unlikely. But who am I to question the accuracy of a Facebook quiz?

The concidence of this week was that we finally got around to making a Cleopatra wig!

Miss5 has had an interest in Ancient Egypt on a long, slow simmer for 2 or 3 months now. It started with a chapter book about young Cleopatra which captured her imagination. The fires were stoked with the arrival of a box of books from my sister, which happened to contain the Egyptian Queen Beauty Book, from the British Museum. I've already blogged about her milk and rose petal bath. We've also made a sparkly Egyptian dress.

Miss5 has been asking for some time now to make the Egyptian wig described in the book. But the instructions said to start with lots of black or brown wool, proceed to make lots and lots of plaits and then attach these plaits to a head band.

Miss5 can't plait yet. Now I may be the worst homeschool mum in the world, but I'm just not going to sit down for an entire afternoon plaiting wool, when I know that even if she sat beside me and learnt how to plait she would completely lose interest after about 5 minutes.

So I'd been pondering it for a while when the solution came to me - polarfleece! Polarfleece doesn't fray at a cut edge, so it is perfect for making fringing out of - and what is a wig, if not a long fringe? So, one excursion to the fabric shop later, we had the supplies. They didn't have black fleece, so we settled for brown, and Miss5 chose a very sparkly trim as the headband - fit for a princess indeed.

Tadaa!

She really is excited - she's just trying on her 'sophisticated' face

And of course, Princess Clary had to have a turn too, because she wants to feel what it is like to have hair

Miss2 getting in on the act

Miss5 was so excited that she wore it for the rest of the day, and Daddy was very surprised to find that we didn't have Miss5 in the back seat of the car - Royalty had accompanied us to collect him from work!