Easy Birthday Felt Crowns

For a while, I've been thinking how much my girls would enjoy having felt crowns like this or this. Here's an actual tutorial if you're interested. And another crown template. And I just found this princess birthday hat from Skip to my Lou which is equally cute, but I'll probably give that a try another time. Thanks to my friends, Gyung-rae and Melanie, I was able to complete the felt crowns for my girls. Well, almost. I still need to sew the flower buttons inside the hearts. I used the Juicy Bits tutorial but made a few changes. I cheated and didn't put fabric over the elastic. Also, her recommended elastic length was way too big for Cheeky, so I had to adjust it a little.

And instead of having one whole piece, I divided the crown to three pieces. For the above crown, I used a red piece for the center and two yellow pieces for the sides. Machine sewing these three parts on the crown (plant-dyed wool felt) made them kind of balloon and gave a quilt-like feeling. I used a stiff pink felt plus the heavy interfacing to make this an extra-sturdy crown. Koko didn't want black thread for her heart and chose light green. It goes well with the rest of the colors.

For Cheeky's crown that is pictured above, I hot-glued the individual felt pieces (red middle; pink for the sides) on the stiff pink felt, and I hoped to sew it with the machine later on, but the machine would not work over the hot glue and at Mel's suggestion, I used black thread and hand-stitched to give it a ragged homemade look. My stitching isn't great, but still I like how it turned out. If I had some pretty lace on hand, I would have hot-glued it in the bottom of the crown.

If I had to do it again, I think I prefer using a sewing machine rather that hot-gluing individual pieces, but still, a hot gun does work in a pinch!