DIY Hallowe'en: The Felt Princess Headband Tutorial

Baby headbands are too cute, aren't they? I used to think they were more or less ornamental, or at the best, they simply served to distinguish a girl baby from a boy baby. However, now I have a baby with fine, sparse hair that is growing long and scraggly, but not growing thick enough to be held back by any hair clip, and I am beginning to understand that hairbands may serve a purpose.

So scratch using a tiara for her Hallowe'en costume because it would not have any hair to be clipped onto. And ditto for the classic circular crown because her crown definitely needs some kind of elastic to keep it anchored on her constantly moving head. The only headgear left is the venerable head/hairband.

This one was particularly easy to pull together because it consists of only three pieces and some fancy cutting.
Here's a template for the shape of the crown. (Note: When you print the template, make sure it is not scaled to fit the page and that it prints at 100%).

(1) Cut one crown template out in your main crown colour (gold, silver, etc.) and one out in a contrasting colour to form the "jewels". Cut some fancy shapes out of the main crown piece for the "jewel" colour to peek through. If you wanted to get fancy you could always overlay a few more colours in here for different coloured jewels, but I just went with imperial blue to match her knight-brothers.

(2) Sew the main crown piece onto the backing piece with a straight stitch around all the outside edges. Reinforce the jewel cutouts by stitching around those as well. Alternately, you could skip a bit of sewing here and glue everything together... but I love the looked of stitched felt.

(3) Using 1/2-inch elastic, cut a piece 11.25-inches long. Fold each end of the elastic over by a 1/2-inch and stitch securely to the each side of the crown (on the back, of course :). You may need to adjust this measurement based on the size of your baby's head. The elastic is pretty forgiving though, so I would assume that this could fit most babies from 6 months up. (It even fits me - by a stretch... har har har).

(4) Admire how fast and simple this project was. Easy as that.