Home! And tutorial...

I am back in California! It's very nice to be home.

Anyway, I want to let you listen to a few more songs just to sum-up my Irish/Scottish music spree and then I'll do my hairpin tutorial.

Silly Wizard does a few of my favorite Scottish songs. This one is awesome, but it is better if you listen to it with lyrics otherwise it's a little tricky to understand. This video does include the lyrics in the description area underneath the video if you go to youtube. :-)



And this one...lovely!


And perhaps my favorite. It's not technically Silly Wizard. It's Andy M. Stewert all by himself. If you don't listen to the other songs, listen to this one. And really listen. It's a story...a very sad story.



Okay, so. Hairpins. It's easy! You'll need.
Artificial flowers.
needle and thread.
Beads (optional)
Hair pins or clips of your preference.

Clip the flower off the stem as close as possible without causing it to fall apart.

I've used both kinds of these hairpins, so it boils down to your preference. This particular flower looks really  good with a bead added to the middle and it can really change the look of the flower, depending on the bead color. I went with a little gold bead for this one. 
So, thread your needle and sew through the bottom of the flower, come up through the middle and string on the bead. (That's not as confusing as it sounds. :-) Sew back down, and come up, through the bead, and down again one or two more times, kind of like sewing on a button, to make sure it is secure.

 Now you can sew it to your pin. Basically, through the flower, around the pin. Through the flower, around the pin. Over and over again until you feel like it wont go anywhere. Tie it off.

I put a drop of super glue on it when I'm done, so that it doesn't slip around on my pin and so the thread doesn't wiggle lose.

I've had fun experimenting with different kinds of flowers. Some I love, and some I'm not super wild about. They all do look pretty, though. It's hard to get a flower to not look good in your hair! lol.

Some flowers have more of a plastic base and can be trickier to attach without destroying. Like this one.

had to sort of tack the flower together after cutting it as close as I could. I just went up through the middle and off to the sides a few times to hold everything in place. then I slid my pin under the plastic and the 'leaf' layer and finished sewing till it seemed secure. Again, a drop of glue is a good idea. This flower is definitely prettier in the hair. It's a little 'blah' by itself.

Basically, just experiment and figure out how you like to make them, and what looks are your favorite. You can do this with big flowers too.

I hope you were able to at least get some idea's from this, even if my instructions were lousy. Flowers are such a fun accessory and it can be fairly cheep to make these. Hobby Lobby has a nice flower selection and you can get some really pretty flowers. So, go and try this out!
God Bless!
Amy

Tangled hair...

Alright. Finally, a hair tutorial. I may one day do an actual 'Rapunzel" hair tutorial. I bet, if I put my mind to it, I can come up with a similar braid to the one that she has in Tangled. But for now I am going to do Rapunzel's Mother's hair style. I did try to find a good picture of the style, but it'd pretty darn near impossible to find a clear shot of it. It's this one.

Yeah. That's the one, alright. :-)

It's a little clearer here.

If you want to see it really clearly, turn on the movie and skip to the 'reunion' scene near the end. You get a couple really nice shots of it. As near as I can tell, this is how to recreate that look.

Part your hair on the side and pull two front sections forward.

Take each side and tie a knot in it. You want these knots to be off to the sides of the middle of the back of your head. Got that? LOL.

And pin in place.

Sorry for the bad picture quality here.

Tie and pin the other side.

After that, you are going to take the leftover hair sticking out from your knots and twist them into a little bun for the center.

I hope you can see that. It's hard taking pictures of yourself! What you should have are two little knots on either side of a little bun. I actually needed to pull my knots a little tighter.)

Me trying to show you from the side...I don't think I quite succeeded. :-)

After I got it up, I went ahead and stuck in a bunch of hair pretties.

And from the front.

I hope you were able to sort of follow that along. If you have short hair and you want to do this, I suggest doing the knots on the side's like normal but instead of twisting the leftover bits, (because if your hair is short you probably wont have very much leftover:-) pull up a little hair from the middle and roll that into a bun, tucking any sticking out 'lefteovers' under it.

I did make the hair pretties that I'm wearing in these pictures. I will do a separate tutorial for the flowers, because they are a little time consuming, but the pearl ones are super easy.

The hair pins I get always come in two rubber banded bunches-one bunch being thicker, stronger hair pins the other being small, skinny hair pins. I never ever use the skinny ones.

 They do nothing in the way of hold up my hair. I used to just throw them out because they would inevitable get mixed up with my good ones and were just a bother. Now, I use them for some of my hair pretty projects.

All you need are some hair pins and some beads of your choice. Bend the pin open-ish.

Slide the bead on,

And bend back into shape. Way-hey! Ta-da.

I made a set of eight.

See? Super easy...and super pretty, I think.

There you are! I hope you enjoyed that. I am sorry that the pictures are pretty blah. Let me know if you try this...and attach a link of how it turned out on you! That would be fun. :-)

God Bless!

Amy