Pride Thyrsus
One of the main ways I get my ideas is by thinking of how I can connect the ancient world to the world we live in now. Part of the credit goes to the post from tumblr user "thoodleoo," who wrote this post about Pride, with which I ran. The reason I came up with the Pride Thyrsus is that Pride Month was coming up and many people in the LGBTQ+ community identify with Dionysus, so I found it fitting to alter the way the thyrsus was depicted in antiquity. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it also gave me the ability to take a thyrsus to Pride with me, which is in October where I live due to the heat in Las Vegas.
Since I had never created even a simple thyrsus before meant that I would be improvising a lot of what I wanted to do; initially, I had planned to do a seven-strand braid around the staff portion, but it would not work in the way I wanted. I braided each color with a three-strand braid instead, glued them all to the top, and wrapped each color around the staff in order. I used floral wire to add grapes to the top of the thyrsus and keep the ribbon in place as well and topped the staff off with a pine cone. Single strands of each color were glued to the pine cone since I still wanted to have an effect of hanging strands. Although the Pride Thyrsus did spark some debate about the queerness of Dionysus, the overall reaction to the Pride Thyrsus has been overwhelmingly positive.
Video of the process:
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