Talking About the Festival Hairband Stand

I took a lot of inspiration from my now 8 year old daughter, when I was designing projects for Crocheting Clothes Kids Love.  I designed this hairband stand because my daughter has a wonderful collection of hairbands, and tossing them in a drawer often damages them. I thought, why not display them in a beautiful way? They can become part of a girls room decor, and be accessible.

The main component you need for the stand is an oatmeal container. I use a lot of oats in my house because I grind oats in my food processor to make flour. My daughter loves it when I make carrot cake, and it is more nutritious with the addition of oat flour. Here is the recipe, in case you are interested. It gets my daughter (and many of her friends at school) to eat carrots, walnuts, and oats. Which makes me love the recipe even more. For the school version, I leave off the frosting because  want it to be a part of a healthy lunch. After you have made delicious things with the oats, you can upcycle the container into the Festival Hairband Stand! 

For the book's photoshoot, I put together a selection of hairbands that I embellished.  I wanted bands that would add interest to the stand without competing with it. I thought it might be interesting to tell you about the bands that were featured on it.

This band was a plain straw band. I had some pretty white lace in my stash. I dyed it with camomile tea, then stitched it to the band with invisible nylon thread.

I covered this band with paper and then decoupaged it with paper pieces I cut from a Spode china catalog, so it would look like a mosaic.

 For this band, I used one of the yarns that I used in the hairband stand and wrapped it around the band, then glued the ends to keep the wraps in place.

 I also wrapped this band with the yarn from the hairband stand, then wrapped it again in two directions to get the x's on top.

This was some handmade lace I bought at a street market in London several years ago. I was saving it for just the right project! I covered a satin band that I had made when I was working as an embroidery designer. You can see some of the embroidery peeking through the lace.

In addition to the oatmeal container, you will need lightweight quilt batting and 1 whole skein of Berroco Weekend "Swimming Hole" 205 yd [189 m], 50 (46m) yds of "Clothesline", and 72 yds (66m) of "Curry".

I was going to buy bands for the photoshoot, but embellishing the ones I already had, made them unique and upcycled as is the underlying theme of the project. 

First Projects from Crocheting Clothes Kids Love!

Now that Crocheting Clothes Kids Love has been out for a little while, projects made from patterns in the book are starting to appear on Ravelry and Instagram. It is wonderful when crocheters post their photos! I was excited to see the Pretty Popcorn Vest worn by a little older girl, and styled differently to the one in the book. Lara Thornberry has made the vest and the Chelsea Capelet, which she lengthened to be more of a sweater vest, for her adorable daughter. She did a beautiful job on these and her daughter is such a lovely model!

Pretty Popcorn Vest

Chelsea Capelet as a Sweater Vest

Suad Murad, was inspired to make the entire trio of hairbands from the book! The Bow Band, Polka Dot Band, and Daisy Band, which are so well done! It is interesting to see the projects made up in different colors as well.

I am looking forward to seeing more and more photos posted, as people complete projects from the book. Seeing that people are using the book and making beautiful things, is the most rewarding part of writing it!