I finally found and bought a lot of wooden rulers which I cut up and made into the shape of a crown. They needed a bit of photoshopping to change their garish colour and to get rid of the "made in china" printed on them.
I printed off scaled images of rulers and glued them onto a cardboard crown I made. It looked alright but I knew I wasn't going to be happy with it not being the real thing.
I wasn't happy with the photoshop results so I played around with different methods of how to achieve a clean image. I used an image from the internet of lots of wooden rulers lined up and made a few clipping masks in the shape of crowns to do this.
