Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Purple Woven Headband


Lately I have become obsessed with making my own headbands. They're a great way to use up fabric scraps, plus I can make the stretchy kind which doesn't give me a headache. It's so hard to find stretchy headbands that are cute and not meant for children. I got the idea for this one after I got a sewing machine with an automatic button hole maker and wanted to practice making button holes. In the end I made 14 button homes on this headband and definitely got the practice!
In total this project took about 1 1/2 hours, probably less if you're already a buttonhole master and more if you're using it for the first time.
The first step was to cut out the fabric for the top part of the headband. I used purple satin. It didn't stretch and I wanted the headband to lay flat so I made the back part, which you don't see since its under the hair, elastic. For this part I cut out a rectangle 18" by 3" so when finished it would be 1.5" wide.

Next I folded it in half the long way, right sides facing each other, and sewed up the edge. After doing this I turned it inside out so the nice side was facing out and all the sewing was on the inside.

After doing this I probably should have pressed it, I'm sure it would have made the button holes a whole lot easier to do but the iron was upstairs and I was lazy :-). So I started right on to the button holes which I would use to thread the ribbon through in the end. I put one hole each inch and made sure to mark where each hole would start so they were even. After using my awesome automatic button hole maker to make all 18 holes I threaded the ribbon through and secured it on each end.

Done with the pretty top part! For the rest I needed 8 more inches to fit my head so I cut out 7" of elastic and a 10" by 3.5" rectangle of black fabric. I sewed the black fabric the same way as the purple and then put the elastic through the middle. I then sewed the elastic onto the edges of the top part and then folded the edges of the black and connected it to the top part as well. This way the top will stay nice and flat and the bottom part with the black fabric will stretch and scrunch up.
Finished Product!

1 comment:

  1. I am so making one of these to go with my dress! Thanks for the tute!

    ReplyDelete