Tuesday, June 2, 2009

An answer to a question - the headband version!

Most of the time my projects start out as "I don't know what I'm doing but I'm going for it!" And lucky for me they usually turn out. My pin-up hair clip seemed to catch quite a few eyes (I know I was pretty happy with it!) but I had a question about doing something like that on a headband. The Y and R Lady and I emailed about flowers, bows, and feathers so I came up with a plan to do all three.

Ages ago I bought a three pack of thin headbands and they have been sitting in my bathroom cupboard pretty much since. I think I wore one or two of them a couple times. I decided to dust one of them off for the flowered headband but I still have two left! So I dug out another. The pattern was not so much my favorite but there's bound to be one of those in every multi-pack. Just fine since I planned to cover it with ribbon anyway.

I chose a grosgrain ribbon just wider than the headband. I prefer using grosgrain ribbon for a lot of my projects because it seems to handle gluing and such much better.




I only put glue in a line down the middle of the headband; it will squish out enough to the edges you won't need more than that.





It may still get a out of line (if you apply it by looking at it from the back it helps) so if you place your fingers in this position:


And lightly run your fingers along the ribbon edges while the glue is still very much wet, I found it straightened out just perfect.


While I was waiting for it to dry I prepped a rose to go on by clipping off the back, which connected it to the stem, removing the greenery (it just wouldn't stay on), and applying a piece of ribbon with tails.





Then I had to wait for both things to dry so I made a bow.

If you loop your ribbon like so...





trim the tails and glue and hold...








wait until dry and then loop a small piece around the middle and glue...



It makes a cute bow.

Which I oddly didn't take a photo of when it was finished...erm...next!


When the bow and flower were done drying I decided to...

This is a little crazy, just to warn you, but I had so many ideas to work with!


...add velcro!





You'll notice I cut the tails off the rose ribbon. If I were ONLY attaching the rose, I would leave the tails on and wrap them around the headband and glue to secure. Simply gluing the flower directly seems like it wouldn't have enough stability.


I also added velcro to the headband (duh) - please make sure you put the same side of the velcro on the embellishments and the opposite side on the headband.




Now you've got options! Albeit they are kinda weird but I wanted to try both and didn't want to glue things onto my last remaining untouched headband.






Don't feel like a bow today? How about a rose? Riiiiiiiiip!

Tada! Crack me up.



Of course if later you wonder, "what was I thinking?!" you can glue a feather into the velcro and wrap that spot with ribbon and you won't even see it.







(Feather courtesy of my neighbor's peacock's molting) If you actually do it, and not just pretend to like I did for the photo, it will look better, but you get the idea.

7 comments:

Melissa said...

Brilliant!!!
I love velcro and use it on just about anything I can get my hands on. I'm thinking of using a neutral colored ribbon like white or black and then making different holiday "toppers", maybe out of felt?. I can't wait to give this try!

Heather said...

You are just full of wonderful ideas!


Hope you Mom had a great birthday!!

Rachel@oneprettything.com said...

This is awesome! So many fun accessory ideas! I'll be linking.

M.L. @ The House of Whimsy said...

DARLING!Just popping in to remind you that my Giveaway ends Friday at noon.
I didn’t see your name on the post.
*It’s the second post down.
Good luck! : )
P.S. LOVED the pic of your cute mom below!

Unknown said...

Love it. That is the best idea. I will make two or more to have one for myself and some christmas presents.

Anonymous said...

That is the cutest thing! Love the idea of using velcro to change things up a little. Genius!

I BLEED PINK said...

Oh wow, what a neat idea!!