Flower hair accessories, my Birthday Gift to Reese.

Fabric Flower headbands make great gifts.

Isn't this cute? Oh, and yes the flower head band is too! There are tutorials all over the craft blogger world for these sweet hair accessories. A couple of them are twisted fabric, and two have the edges melted by holding each petal edge near a flame. That makes the fabric curl and pucker slightly adding dimension.

The other two I made are simply felt cut outs layered and sewn together.  Most tutorials have you using a hot glue gun to assemble the flowers but I found my fingers burned and it looked messy. Also the flowers then had a stiff hard feel to them I didn't care for; so, stitching for me, no hot glue!

A couple of tips if you want to make these;

• Look up a couple tutorials to decide which one will work best for you.
• For the twisted fabric flowers, I used a cotton fabric, cut my strips about 1 1/2 inches wide.  How long your strips are will be determined by how big you want your finished flower to be. A wider strip will result in a fuller flower.  Experiment a little before you get started.
• Use a good base. I used a circle of felt and stitched the fabric twist to the base every 1/4 inch or so. The leaves are squares of fabric with the center edges turned under, added when the flower was finished.
• The flowers with the melted edges took a little time to get just right. You will have to use a synthetic fabric that will melt, most tutorials suggest an organza type fabric. PLEASE NOTE: The fabric can and probably will at some point catch fire.  Please have a bowl of water near to douse your fabric into if needed. You should place the petals close to but not in the flame, slowly turning them to get the effect you desire. I used a clothes pin to hold the smaller petals.  A candle in a jar is not the best to use because it puts your hand over not next to the flame.
• For the felt flowers, again I drew a template with each layer smaller, and stitched the layers together in the middle adding the leaves last.  On the purple flower I put a yellow circle for a center and did a blanket stitch around it.
• I used head bands and hair clips I purchased at Wal-mart to attach the flowers to.  The head bands I used had a woven fabric covering making it easy to sew the flower directly onto it. The clips I opened and then neatly stitched the flowers to the back side of it.

So there you have it. I had fun making these and I'm sure to make many more.  What do you think? Pretty cute?