Marissa's Headband

A coworker's daughter was going through chemo during her senior year of high school and when all her hair fell out, she rocked a wig-less head, even to her prom. Instead, she asked me if I could make a headband for her, something pretty and sparkly.

We went shopping at the craft store together and picked out ribbon that matched her dress. She wanted it to wrap around her head, tie at the back with a simple bow and have long dangling ends that would trail down her back. We looked at all of the different kinds of lace by the yard and picked out something that was pretty, but not overly complicated. It came with tiny pearl seed beads sewn all over it, so after finding two spots in the pattern to cut the lace down to size, I had to cut out the seed beads and pray that I wouldn't accidentally cut part of the lace itself.

Then came the scary part. The ribbon had to weave in and out of the lace, to tie it down around her head, but also so the color of the ribbon would come through. So in strategic spots, I actually cut through the lace pattern itself to make holes for the ribbon to slide through. As I cut each hole, I glued the edges with clear nail polish to make sure nothing unraveled and held it slightly open as it dried so that it wouldn't stick to itself. It was a nerve wracking process, cutting each hole one at a time, waiting for the polish to dry completely before moving onto the next hole. Eventually I finished and the next thing to do was add the requisite "sparkle".

I didn't want to add crystals to the parts of the headband that were going to be covered by the ribbon, but not wanting to mess up the actual ribbon that was going to be in the finished piece, I used a stand-in of the same width. We hadn't skimped on the bling; we bought Swarovski crystals because of their brilliant shine. They were more expensive, but well worth the price.

I had never worked with hot fix crystals before this project, and I was terrified that after all my careful work of cutting the lace that I would end up burning it, especially when I got to the super tiny ones. In the end though, the crystals adhered with no problem, it just took forever putting them all over the lace.

The ribbon it ended up on was a deep royal blue, which set off the lace and crystals even better than the lighter proxy ribbon did. And the sparkle... well, seeing the lights bounce off of them in a video is much better than still shots:

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