How to make the Imperial Russian Crown

Crowns have been around since prehistoric times. If you wonder why look at the animal kingdom. 

Lion’s mane.  

 

Photo Credit: Kevin Pluck/Wikimedia Commons

Deer’s antlers.  

 

Photo credit: Bill Ebbesen/Wikimedia Commons

Hoopoe’s crown of feathers.  

 

Photo Credit: J. M. Garg/Wikimedia Commons

Russian Boyars

 

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

There is something majestic about impressively big stuff on your head, isn’t it?  No wonder using special headgear to designate rulers has been used by all civilizations around the globe.

 

Little kids who often feel small and powerless are drawn to crowns like Claude Monet to water lilies.  Not only crowns are fun to wear and fun to play with (“I am the king of the world!”), they are also fun to make (show me a kid who doesn’t like glitter, color, and glue).

 

I think every child should make their own crown at least once.  It teaches appreciation. We have a number of store bought crowns that are always laying around and being stepped on.  But once we made our own crown my 4-year old noted, “I didn’t think it would be so hard to make a crown!”  And now she is very careful with it.  I think it might even last another five days.  

 

In order to make this crown, I studied the images of the Imperial Crown of Russia and made a drawing (that is available to you as printable in What You Need section below ).  Of course, I couldn’t make it as intricate as the actual crown or it wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.  Neither did we have pearls and diamonds lying around, so we decorated our crowns with paints and glitter.  Kids were very pleased with the results and have been playing with it for a few days now.

The modern replica of the Imperial Russian crown Photo credit: Shakko/Wikipedia

The Imperial Crown of Russia has an interesting history.  It was first used for the coronation of Catherine the Great and it was used for all the subsequent coronations until that of the last Tsar, Nicolas II.  It was designed to have two hemispheres to represent the merger of East and West in Russian culture.  A row of 75 rare, large pearls decorate the edges of hemispheres. The cross on top is made out of diamonds and it represents three things: the Christian faith of Tsar, the God-given power of the monarchy and the supremacy of the divine order over earthly power. The entire surface of the crown is adorned with 4,936 diamonds arranged in a beautiful and intricate pattern.  At the apex of the central arch is a large red spinel (the second largest spinel in the world).  

What you need

What to do

4.   To imitate the row of pearls we dipped the back end of the #2 knitting needle into the white paint and dotted along the edges of hemispheres.  Feel free to use sticker rhinestones; they would be absolutely perfect for this task, but we didn’t have any handy.

Left one is painted with a mixture of white + orange, while right one is painted with a mixture of white + yellow

7.  Tape the edges on the inside.  We didn’t decorate the inside part, but go ahead do it, if you can’t resist the urge. 

Have fun playing!