What do you do with crazy baby hair? Kate is at that age where her hair is getting just a little crazy as it grows out. It’s not quite long enough to pull it off her face into a little pony tail on top of her head yet, (which Leah wore for months when she was a baby) so it’s constantly in her eyes.
Plus, she tends to eat and then run her hands through her hair, which certainly does not help the baby hair craziness! I have wanted to make her a headband to deal with her unruly baby hair for awhile now.
I love making pretty things, and what I love even more is making pretty things that my girls can actually use. But what I don’t like doing is needlessly spending money on things we don’t need. I really wanted the headband to be gray, but I didn’t have any jersey knit fabric, and I certainly didn’t want to buy a great big piece only to use enough for a headband or two.
I don’t know why I didn’t come up with this idea sooner! I decided to raid my pile of old clothes destined for Goodwill to find something that would work. As luck would have it, I found this old sweater, which was absolutely perfect for what I wanted to make:
Then I went through our old kids clothes Goodwill pile and found tons of options for making flowers. I chose these worn out corduroy pants for the flower:
I cut the sweater and the pants into several pieces. I’ve never cut up clothes on purpose before, so it felt a little weird to purposely wreck them. But once I got past the initial cuts I was pretty excited about the great fabrics I found at home for FREE!
Fabric Flower Headband Tutorial
I’m pretty excited about this amazing FREE offer! Right now you can get a Free Udder Cover Nursing Cover! All you have to do is pay for the shipping which is about $8-$12 within America. The promo code is “ENBABY”. They ship to all countries outside of the United States as well, but I’m not sure what the shipping costs would be. You can check out the full post about it here. Now on to the tutorial!
To make a fabric flower, I started with a long strip cut from the corduroy pants. Different sizes of strips will make different sizes of flowers:
Do a loose stitch down the middle of the strip of fabric:
Pull the thread to gather and bunch the fabric all together:
Fold it in half and roll the fabric around itself:
Keep rolling the fabric around itself:
Until you have the shape you want for the fabric flower:
Put a few stitches through the bottom of the fabric flower to secure it all together:
So now that the fabric flower is made, take a piece of the headband fabric and cut it into a strip twice the width that you’d like the fabric flower headband to be. My headband is about 2″ wide, so the strip was roughly 4″ wide. The length of my headband was 12.5″, but when I make another one I’ll make it a little longer. This one is just a little snug on Kate’s little head:
Fold it in half with the right side on the inside and stitch the long edges together.
IMPORTANT: Pull both ends of the fabric as you run it through the sewing machine so that the headband actually stretches after you finish sewing it.
When you turn it right side out you’ll end up with a long piece of fabric for the headband. I wanted the seam on the center of the inside of the headband:
To make a neater looking end, I tucked in about 1/4″ of fabric into the headband before I tucked the other end into it. This just hides the unfinished edges:
Run it through the sewing machine to close the headband:
Sew the fabric flower you’ve made onto the headband and you are done!
I love the way it turned out! The sweater fabric is even nicer than any jersey knit fabric I would have ended up buying from the fabric store and I love the texture of the corduroy fabric flower.
It was made all with materials I found at home so it was 100% free! And it even had the added benefit of getting some extra mileage out of our old clothes.
I have two daughters so I can’t make only one headband! Be sure to check out the Fabric Flower Headband Tutorial #2 tomorrow for another great headband:
How do you deal with unruly and crazy baby hair as it grows out?
Cool stuffs, now I can recycle some of my daughter’s clothes and make some of fancy hair accessories. I’m thinking of making some of those unique hair accessories from hairclippy.com to make it more interesting.