Blue and Silver Christmas - Day 21 - Ribbon Gift Bow Headbands and Hair Clips

I've seen a lot of homemade gift bows out there this season. I think the original tutorial came from How About Orange:

I saw these back in November and made a few out of magazine pages and loved them. Then I thought, "these would be super cute hair clips or headbands!"

First I tried making them out of some charmeuse fabric, but it was so floppy. I wasn't feeling the love for it. I even attempted a couple different techniques to make the fabric stiffer (like a good inventor). Mod Podge?  A mess. It eventually dried decent but definitely not worth the hassle it was to get even one strip stiff.

Heated sugar water? A VERY sticky mess that never dried!

Boo.

Needed a new medium, the fabric I was using wasn't cutting the cheese. Ribbon!! 

And I shortened the length and used a smaller width to keep them more firm and crisp looking.

So for this larger blue one I used the instructions shown on the How About Orange site (link above), but I cut the lengths to 6", 5", and 4". I think center was 2". And I hot glued them instead of stapling. I also considered stitching them, but mostly I was feeling lazy and didn't want to go upstairs to get my sewing crap out.

 Once I had the bow completed, I cut out two circes from some flannel fabric I had on hand. Felt also works great with hot glue. Put glue all over one circle and then attach it to the bottom of the bow. Put glue on the second circle, open the clip, and sandwich the top "jaw" of the clip between the flannel circle on the bow and the glued side of the second circle. Underneath should look like this when finished:  (but more centered...leave me alone..)

The smaller ones were cut out of 3/8" ribbon at 5", 4.25", and 3.5". The smallest was still 2".

This time I made a headband. I used the same 3/8" ribbon and wrapped it around an old lame-o Disney princess headband and hot glued the ends down. Still attached the flannel circle and then sandwiched the headband between two flannel pieces. This particular one I did two small bows side by side.

I will be linking to some of the fabulous parties on my sidebar!

Aloha and Mele Kalikimaka,
charlie

Blue and Silver Christmas - Day 20 - My White Ruffles

Ummm...it's officially time to get a new tree. But what frugal gal in their right mind would want to go out and shop for one two weeks before Christmas? Not I!! I'll be a patient, Dave Ramsey follower and will wait for the after-Christmas sales.

What's a gal to do with the gimpy, faux, "6-foot" tree leaned up against the wall in her living room (yeah...Wal-mart calls it 6-ft, but mostly it's 4-ft and has a 2-ft totem pole sticking up at the top...)?? I'm typically a November 1st Christmas crazy! Staring at that hot mess of a worthless bush in my corner was making me livid lose my Christmas cheer!

Enter my saving grace:

See the hunk of junk tree stand there on the left? Yep. Leg broke off. And no amount of glue would keep it together. I thought I had it once and even got the lights 1/2 way strung only to have the dumb thing tip over on top of me...boy did that tick me off  frost my cookies!

Then my sweet neighbor offered to let me use their real tree stand since they are spending the holidays on the "mainland" and didn't set up a tree!  Check that beefy bad-boy out with the scrawny fake trunk sticking up. I imagine that's a lot how my legs looked in jr. high...Olive Oil...but blonde. And not tall. So not really Olive Oil at all. Ahem...

And we're back to Christmas...

So I decided to cover my make-shift stand with something frilly and fancy. I knew I wanted white, and I knew I wanted ruffles. Everything's better with ruffles.

So I busted out some charmeuse, cut out a ginormous 36" wide circle and cut a slit across the radius (to the center) and then three little 1" slits in the other three directions. I turned over the edges where I had cut up the radius to give those edges a finished look, but I left the circumferece unfinished since I was adding ruffles.

My fabric was 48" wide, and I tore 13 strips 2" wide.  Then I busted out my cheap little Singer and went to work making ruffles.

Set tension on 6 this time (we set it on 10 for the flowers on the flower lamp if you remember that one, but we want them a little more loose now) and stitch length still on 4. Like this:

Then I stitched straight up the center. Make sure to hold on to the fabric after it feeds through just slightly. That will make sure it doesn't ruffle TOO much (otherwise you'll need a LOT more strips, but it will look more frilly!). You'll get the hang of it after testing on your first strip.

I stitched three strips to the hem of the skirt and then wrapped the rest around the tree as garland. :)

We've still got to hang our glitter sea shell ornaments, and I think I'm going to do a few paper ornaments, so we're not quite finished yet, but it's getting there!

I wish I would've made it slightly larger, but c'est la vie!

Aloha and Mele Kalikimaka,

charlie