Are you a fan of accessories? You probably have plenty of bracelets, earrings, necklaces, shoes, bags… But what about your head? This summer, say goodbye to boring hair ties, personality-free headbands, and standard-issue clips. In today’s post, we’re bringing you some interesting ideas for creating your own original and unique accessories to decorate and, at the same time, tame your hair. You can make some of them yourself from scratch, while others involve adding your personal touch to basics you can find in any store.
Here are our 5 favorite DIY hair accessories.
1. Hair bands.
They’re especially useful in summer for keeping your hair under control without leaving tan lines. There are many ways to create hair bands from scratch, and we can help you with almost all of them. That’s what we’re here for, right? One of the most fashionable styles this summer is the turban-style headband. We recently released a tutorial for making one, and knit fabric is the best choice. We also have another fantastic tutorial for making a bow headband with your favorite fabric, as well as one for making a thicker T-shirt-yarn braid than the ones used for bracelets; you can also use those to create elastic, adjustable hair bands. If you like crochet, you can make one that way too, or, if you want something simple, decorate thick sewn elastic to your liking with flowers or buttons. If you prefer, you can also order them from us.
2. Personalized headbands and clips.
As an alternative to hair bands, you can use headbands, and there are plenty of ways to personalize them too—techniques that can also be used on other accessories, such as clips. The first thing you can do is cover the surface with fabric: you can simply glue it, sew it, or wrap it around the headband using a strip of whatever fabric you want, as in the one shown in this photograph from conideade.com. If you do the latter, remember to cut the fabric with pinking shears so it doesn’t fray. If the headband is thin and you don’t want it to stand out, you don’t even need to cover it. Once you’ve covered the surface, you have a wide range of options to choose from: you can tie or glue on bows, buttons, fabric or felt flowers, rhinestones, brooches…
conideade.com
3. Elastic scrunchies.
One of our latest creations and the stars of our latest tutorial, which you can watch at this link: How to Make Elastic Scrunchies. They’re very easy to make, and you’ll just need a little patience when joining the ends so the finish looks nice and the stitches aren’t too visible. All you need is a piece of your favorite fabric, some elastic, and a sewing machine, although you can also make them by hand. Keep a safety pin handy too, because it will be very useful for turning the sewn fabric right side out and inserting the elastic. Make them in lots of colors to coordinate with your clothes, and when you’re not wearing one in your hair, it will look much prettier on your wrist than one of those hair ties we always carry “just in case.”
4. Clips with covered buttons.
They’re super easy to make and very durable with the materials you’ll find in our store: snap clips, snaps and a button-covering tool with small pieces of fabric. They’re also a wonderful way to use up fabric scraps that apparently aren’t good for making anything. Another way to personalize your clips and bobby pins is to glue on regular buttons, little flowers, or other decorations with a bit of ordinary glue, although this makes them much more likely to break, and you may end up losing whatever you used to decorate them. Another way to attach decorations without glue would be to sew them onto a thin fabric ribbon and tie it around the closed end of the bobby pin, although you’ll need some dexterity since it’s a very small space.
5. Hair combs.
It’s an accessory we don’t often use, but when personalized well, it looks great with updos. They’re very easy to decorate because of their shape. One of the methods we’ve liked most is this very simple one from lemonjitters.com, which you can see in the photograph and which simply involves wrapping threads in different colors. You can use a tiny drop of glue to seal each series, but it really isn’t necessary. Just trap the loose end of the thread beneath the next color and tie a knot in the last one. Hair combs also have enough surface area for attaching other decorations if you’d like: what do you think of a comb with butterflies? Maybe you’d prefer to glue on rhinestones or add some fabric flowers.
With these DIY hair accessories, keep your head stylish inside and out.