Mar 6, 2014 | DIY
Spring is headed our way, and what better way to embrace it than to whip up some quick DIY hair adornments? Here are some ideas for fun and fabulous pieces to add the crowing touch to your warm weather outfits.
For the above look at Dolce & Gabbana, wrap a thin wire headband with a string of gold beads, securing here and there with dabs of hot glue. Pull apart sprays of white and light pink silk blossoms from the craft store, and attach to a long piece of soft jewelry wire, wrapping the wire around the base of each flower. Once your hair is styled into a braided bun, poke one end of the wire into the underside of the bun, wrap around the top of the head and back down again, and finish by wrapping around the bun and tucking the end in. Complete the look by hot-gluing large gold coin buttons onto a hair clip, and clipping it just above the bun at the back.
Go totally boho like at Anna Sui by hot-gluing distressed silk blossoms onto a bundle of long velvet ribbons. Also glue on a bridal applique in the center flower at the forehead. Tie at the back so the ribbons trail down into the hair.
The super-luxe headbands at Tanya Taylor are easy to re-create with clusters of rhinestones and jewels, or vintage buttons or brooches, clipped along wide black satin-covered headbands.
Valentino‘s studded headbands could be made by covering a headband base with maroon leather and gluing gold buttons in rows along the top and sides.
The pretty flowers at Zac Posen could be made with silk or paper blooms run through with bobby pins and pinned straight into a messy updo at intervals.
To make the interesting top clips at Elie Saab: on a stretchy gold headband base, attach a slightly curved flat gold barrette using thread to loop it onto the base. Just go around the bottom part of the clip numerous times until it won’t budge from the stretchy headband. (Goody makes an excellent dupe of that gold clip.)
Tiny pretty flowers dotted the hair at Honor: and to make your own, I’d suggest using dimensional scrapbooking stickers (or tiny paper or silk flowers found in the same section). If the sticky side isn’t sticky enough to stick into your hair, snip a tiny piece of fine-toothed sticky-back velcro and attach to the backs of the blooms.
The wide minimalist ponytail holders at Jason Wu could be made with some gold leather and a hair elastic (just hand-sew each end of the leather piece to the hair elastic, and slide it over a secured ponytail).
You could make a similar ponytail holder just like the above to mimic the look at Helmut Lang. In this case I believe you should use a larger rectangle of black leather and attach sticky-back velcro to both sides of it; secure the ponytail with an elastic, and wrap the leather around it, closing with the velcro.
For Jenny Packham‘s ethereal clips, just glue or wire a vintage insect brooch, finding, or charm onto the end of a matching bobby pin in silver or gold.
Happy DIY’ing!
xo
Carly
Images via Fashionising. Read their full rundown of Spring Hair Accessories here (which also includes how to style the hair in the above hairstyles).
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Dec 27, 2013 | DIY, Life
New Year’s Eve is rapidly approaching – do you know what you will be wearing yet? There is a definite trend towards wearing something sparkly, large, and a total showstopper on one’s head for that evening – and I just love the boldness of it! Here are some fabulous DIY’s for making your own New Year’s Eve head adornment to ring in 2014! (more…)
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May 26, 2011 | DIY
I’ve been so busy lately I’ve been neglecting to share things that I’ve made. Here are a couple items that I’ve finished up and am enjoying:
Galaxy-Print Scrunchie
Make following this tutorial from some leftover self-designed galaxy-print fabric scraps. I’m making a top with the fabric and since the tiny amount I bought was so goshdarn expesnive, I didn’t want to let any part of it go to waste. The fabric is silk, backed in black mesh chiffon. I should have made it twice as wide, but I only had so many scraps leftover. It tends to slip out of my hair since it’s silk, so I wear it around a hair-tie.
Tribal Necklace
Made with faux bamboo-stick beads and faux coral beads from Michael’s. I love the spiky organic-ness to it.
Bohemian Leaf Head-band (Head-dress?)
I’m not really a boho gal, but I couldn’t resist crafting this. Take any flat-ish jewely finding that has a hole in either end, and string them together with jumprings to make an adornment for your brow. The leaf findings I used only had one hole, so I drilled another one in the end of each piece. Which took a $%##% long time, too.
Feather Earrings
Made in the style of Owlita. (Theirs are much nicer, though!) I just wired together some feathers and added a handmade ear-wire to them. I love how they mingle in with my hair.
Have you made any projects recently that you’re dying to show off? Do tell!
xoxox
Carly
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Jan 5, 2011 | Media
all photos by Kava Gorna, NYTimes.com
Or at least the blame shall fall to Chelsea Zalopany, who wrote the Dec. 30 article “Feathered Friends / D.I.Y. Headbands.”
Oh, New York Times. I appreciate your efforts to make DIY more accessible to everyone, I truly do. But you’re approaching it wrong.
To make DIY appeal to a large audience, you need to showcase something that’s easy and that anyone can do (at least to start off with; though you can totally go off on a tangent into cray-cray complicated projects once you’ve whet the appetite).
The opening paragraph is almost a contradiction in terms. How many of you spend the time between Christmas and New Year’s “just sitting around?” Me, I spend it with family, running to New Year’s get-togethers, send out thank-you cards for Christmas presents, exchanging gifts that were the wrong size or broken when I opened the box, cleaning out my email inbox, taking down the decorations, throwing out all the extra Christmas cookies…and that’s just for starters. But even in the spare time I do have…if I’m considering a DIY project, well…
It takes Behr three hours to create each spring 2011 twig headpiece, and she’s broken it down into four easy steps. Now that’s time well spent.
Now there’s one sentence guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of anyone even dabbling in DIY…and enough to send me back to my Christmas cookies.
Why spend 3 hours on a single hand-dyed, hand-shaped, hand-wrapped feather headpiece? (Unless you enjoy the process that much.) I’d rather use those 3 hours to make:
*2 Polka-Dot Shoe-Clips
*1 Magazine Clutch
*1 Cage Cuff
*2 Scroll Earrings
*and a Woven Ribbon Bow Tunic
Kind of like the 12 Days of Christmas. You can even set it to music (start with the tune from the “5 Golden rings” part), if you like.;-) [And all these quick-and-easy projects are coming up here on Chic Steals…stay tuned!]
And all that will probably only take an hour and a half, so you can also make a feathered headband using my tutorial here, just for good measure.:-) [Use a “hat pad” instead of hand-gluing all the feathers like I did; there’s some great choices here.)
So leave the involved, 4-step process using unbleached coq feathers, setting with vinegar, drying with a hair-dryer, steaming over a kitchen teakettle, hand-stripping, and hand-wrapping painstakingly in wire…to the experts. That’s what you pay $148 for. (But if you ever wanted to attempt it, now you know how the designer actually does it.)
The NYTimes also needs to interview someone who actually understands how to translate a hand-crafted, couture piece into something satisfyingly simple (and cheap!) to replicate. (Probably not the original designer of the piece, unless they can design for the budget market. It’s a different skill-set to address the questions of “how can we imitate the luxe look and where can we cut corners? How can someone make this at home easily, with readily-available materials?” These aren’t usually questions up-market designers are asking themselves as they design, which makes someone like this probably not the best source when it comes to a post-holiday DIY.)
And for the love of Mike, have someone modeling the finished product. A designer (and writer!) should know that the hesitant reader (and DIY’er looking for her next project to tempt her away from those cookies) can be swayed by a well-executed $$$money shot.
What do you guys think? Are you DYING to try this 3-hour DIY? Or does it negate the meaning of D.I.Y….a veritable contradiction-in-terms, if you will?
xoxox
Carly
P.S. Thank you all for your kind words and well-wishes to my mother during this difficult time for her and our family. Regularly-scheduled blog content will return tomorrow. Thank you.
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Sep 19, 2010 | DIY
In the home stretch now, everyone! Another one of my submissions for Style Sample Magazine and New York Design Shop’s Create Couture Challenge back in early August.
Materials:
*White Sweater Style Stretch Trim
*Gold Circle Studs
Additional Tools/Materials:
*thin headband
*sewing machine + needle for knits (optional)
*hand-sewing needle
*matching thread
*hot-glue gun
How to:
1. Sew the Stretch Trim into a tube down its long side. (I sewed it on the sewing machine but you can hand-stitch it if you prefer.) Turn right-side out.
2. Cut into 3 pieces: 1 longer for the large flower, and 2 shorter for the two smaller flowers.
3. Hand-stitch the two ends of the long piece of Trim together, to form a circle.
Make 5 loops in the circle and push inwards to the center, stitching through the center area.
4. Pull the thread tight to gather the loops.
5. Sew a few times more all the way through the center to secure.
6. Repeat Steps 3) – 5) for the two smaller flowers. I made only 4 loops (4 petals) for each.
7. Dab some hot glue in the center of each flower, and glue down a Circle Stud.
8. Hot-glue each flower to the top of a thin headband. (For more security, I’d recommend hand-sewing the flowers on, looping the thread around the headband.)
And that’s it! This of course can be accomplished by using any scrap fabric or ribbon you have – though it works particularly well with “puffy” fabric like this sweater stretch trim because it creates a tube-like appearance to the flower petals.
Everything’s in bloom during the summer!
xoxox
Carly
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