How To: My Wedding Day Hair Piece

March 17, 2012 was the happiest day of my life and I have never felt more beautiful than I did on that day.  So how does a bride make it through a day of full of stress... planning, planning, and more planning!  Fortunately, I only worked part time in the months leading up to my wedding. This left me plenty of time to do lots of planning and some small wedding crafts. In the next few months I will try to share some of the crafts I did as well as how I organized/planned my wedding. Therefore...

Welcome to my first "How To:" post.  Today I'm going to show you how I made the hair piece I wore for the reception part of my wedding.  First, where did the flower come from?  My dress.  That was the easy part.  When I tried on my dress, initially I wanted to "say no to the dress" because of these ugly flowers and (what I call) shoestrings that dangled off the front and back.  But as I began to investigate I realized that they were easily taken off and what was revealed underneath was beautiful beading! Then, my challenge was what to do with these crazy fabric flowers.  Where the inspiration came from I'm not really sure, probably the hundred thousand wedding photos I looked at in the planning process. So, moral of the story?  Keep your eyes open.  I've often found that the cutest crafts have come from things I had laying around the house.  Have an old shirt you aren't going to wear any more? See some cute fabric at Hobby Lobby? Cut something off a dress (like all that extra fabric after they hemmed your dress)? Turn it into a cute head band or clip. Anyways, here is what I came up with.




What you'll need:

• Fabric (the flower in my case)
• Hot glue
• A couple of alligator hair clips 
• Thread
• Needle

 Step 1:

Cut off any unneeded parts.  I cut off the ugly shoestrings.

Step 2:
Scrunch the sides together to make it more compact.  My flower had some floral wire in it that caused it to stay in place.  However if yours does not, or it is not staying as tight as you would like it to, you can simply use a needle and thread to hold it in place.  Now don't worry, professional sewing skills are not needed. No one will even know you did it much less how badly! Simply thread the needle and push it back and forth through the bottom a few times while you hold the flower in place and then tie a knot at the end.

Step 3: 

Finally, glue a couple of alligator clips onto the back of your flower.  I found a package of 10 at Jo Ann's Fabric for around $3.00. Use as many or as few as you would like.  I wanted a pretty tight hold so I used two clips. 

And thats it! All done.  The day of the wedding I gave the clip to my hair stylist and she showed my Maid of Honor how to clip it in place after the veil was taken off.  This was a super simple DIY craft that cost me less than $5.00 and that really added something to my wedding pictures! 

I hope this was useful and that you can find the inspiration to do it yourself.  Till then, I wish you creative crafting!

Courtney