fabric scraps + ugly old headband + 30 minutes = Peach Rosette Headband!

This is a project I made a few weeks back - one of those that I've had in "storage" for awhile, waiting for the energy/inspiration/motivation/time to put it on my blog. It represented one of the first sewing projects I made for myself, rather than Annabel (possibly THE first - I can't remember for sure). Here's the finished look:

A lovely rosette headband featuring my current favorite color: peach!

What follows is a not-very-detailed pictorial documentation of how I put this together in about 30 minutes.

I started with some scrappy fabric strips, like this:

This particular strip was a selvedge edge I'd trimmed off for another project. I thought the mix of a clean edge and a raw edge would add interesting texture. Plus, it would have gone in the garbage otherwise.

Then, I spiraled the strips into rosettes and sewed them together. Total time: about ten minutes for both rosettes.

(I didn't use a particular tutorial to figure this out, but there's a ton of them out there if you want to learn. Just do a search for "fabric rosette tutorial.")

Then, I glued some pretty ribbon onto an ugly old orange headband that I had lying around (probably from high school). About ten minutes of work.

I had bought about a dollar's worth of the ribbon at a local fabric store because I fell in love with it. I had no idea at the time what I would use it for, so I was pretty happy to put it to good use on this project. (And, the shoe goo was the only glue I could find around the apartment that was appropriate for the project. It worked great, but I think I'm permanently brain damaged from the fumes. Note to self: Buy a hot glue gun.)

After the ribbon glue was firmly dried (about 5 minutes), I glued the rosettes onto the headband.

I'm really glad the orange doesn't show too much in the finished product, because it looks horribly garish in this picture next to the peach and brown. Also, here you can kind of see the spiral stitching I used to hold the rosettes together.

Five more minutes to let the rosette glue dry, and voila!

(Let it be known: I do not advocate wearing a peach and brown headband with a mustard-colored sweater. It just happened to be what I was wearing at the time, and I was too impatient to take pictures to think about changing my shirt.)

The stitching on the rosettes looks a little more prominent here than I would like, but most people aren't examining it this close up anyway.

10 minutes + 10 + 5 + 5 = 30 minute project! Totally happy with the end result. And especially happy that the whole thing cost me $1, which was just for the ribbon, since everything else was just lying around the apartment.

I've gotten lots of compliments on it, and I always debate whether to say that I made it, because I don't want to sound arrogant. But I guess I am pretty proud of my first attempt at making something like this!

After I finished the headband and was excited about it working out so well (and because it only took a half hour and I still had nap time to burn), I decided to make a couple of rosette hair clippies as well.

I used exactly the same process as for the headband, except I made the rosettes smaller. I simply glued them onto the hair clippies and DONE!

(If you're wondering where to find these plain metal clippies for cheap, I finally found them in the sewing section at Walmart. They were labeled as some kind of "hem clip" or something - I think the idea was to use them instead of straight pins in sewing projects. I've never heard of that before, but there they were, and for MUCH cheaper than buying the colored ones at Target, which was all I could find anywhere else.)

This is a perfect Sunday afternoon craft. Very little time and effort for a very satisfying result! Cost/Reward ratio = Excellent. I need to make some more in fun and different colors. Maybe this afternoon...