I picked up a resin stag head in an after-christmas sale a few years ago, with the intention of decorating it in some way. Not very long after that, my partner requested some fancy tweed trousers and waistcoat. Having totally fallen in love with tweed, I decided to cover the stag head in it.
I chose 5 patterns that went well together and a piece of fake leather for the nose. I painted the eyes with a glossy black paint before starting with the fabrics, and let it dry overnight.
Next, I started by assessing the head shape and deciding what areas I wanted in which colour. I cut the pieces by eye, starting with the mottled orangey-brown because I wanted all the other colours to overlap it. I stuck it down with Copydex, which I swear by for fabrics, painting it onto the model and sticking the fabric down by patting it.
Then I did the brown bits of neck and face, along with the nose. I cut pieces so that the bias would allow for a bit of stretching over curves, and erred on the side of cutting more pieces rather than less. The nose I folded and tacked with a couple of stitches and glued in place over the top lip piece, but under the muzzle pieces.
The back of the head and ears is a darker brown fabric that I followed more or less the same steps as before, but I used smaller pieces around the base of the antlers because of the extreme curves.
Likewise the antlers were done in shortish strips to accommodate the many compound curves.
The trophy shield I bought on ebay, and the resin head already had a hole for mounting on a protruding screw. The result now hangs proudly on my living room wall.
