Chinese Paper Umbrella

So after our cardboard spheres, we all selected an object at random from a box. Well, I didn't get to. I picked the same item as somebody at my table, and Valerie rolled her eyes, went "oh my god, you got it too" and gave me this instead.

A little Chinese paper umbrella that you would find in an alcoholic beverage. It was then that we were told what our project would be: to recreate the object at a much larger scale, and to integrate it to the body/make it wearable.

So of course the first thing I did was panic, because I was being asked to recreate something with a very specific functionality in a medium that largely prefers to remain a static object.

However, before we were even allowed to start worrying about this, we were told to come up with three proposals on how to accomplish attaching our objects to our bodies.

 Sort of an umbrella belt type thing. Umbrelta? 

It only got 1 vote.

 An umbrella hat. It got 12 or so votes.

Pierced diagonally through skull. I wish I had gone with this one.

 17 votes.

I wondered how I would possibly manage to make a functional umbrella out of cardboard, and after letting it stew in my head for about half an hour I decided "screw it" and just started cutting out pieces. After a while I had kind of an idea of what I was doing. I started stripping down cardboard triangles down to the corrugation so I could use them for the papery part of the umbrella.

 Have you ever wondered what the 

skeleton of an umbrella looks like?

I haven't, either.

Soooo I just kind of started cobbling all of this together. I decided after a while that making it functional was nothing more than a pipe dream, and decided I'd rather just focus on getting the umbrella look down. So I made it into a hat. This is the final result.

Unfortunately... RIGHT BEFORE I WENT TO PRESENT IT... One of the chinstraps broke. I ended up having to reattach the chinstrap to the inside of the umbrella with a huge, ugly piece of blue tape, which I was immediately jumped on and attacked over after I presented it. I kept my poker face on, but oh my God, the fury of a billion white hot suns.

In addition to the craftsmanship not being particularly popular with the harsh judging I faced, the way I presented it was also lacking. About three minutes after I walked off of the stage, I wished that I had made the "handle" part of the umbrella red, and trudged in going "braiiiins" like I was a zombie. I probably would have thought of that beforehand, but I was so enveloped just trying to finish the project that I didn't really think about presenting it.

Oh well!