More Hair Clips

I made two cute little hair accessories yesterday. One was a simple black ribbon twisted into a military braid with the ends tucked in. I glued it to a plain snap clip, using a piece of rubber shelf liner for no-slip grip on the inside, of course (see previous hair accessory post for more on this). In the curves of the outer edges of the braid as well as in the center of the two ends of it, I stuck some big rhinestones. It looks nice, though I would have preferred smaller ones. But I had to use what I had. It still looks pretty in the hair, though I did not do a very neat job and had a lot of glue drips to pick off, not all of which were willing to separate from the ribbon. I colored over the stubborn ones with a black Sharpie, and that made them somewhat less obvious. Oh well, I'm not selling these or anything, so if it's not perfect, chalk it up to practice, right?

The other clip I made was a red and white candy in a wrapper. In the lollipop and candy clip tutorial I linked to in an earlier post, it instructs you to use several colors of ribbon and roll them together as a spiral. I felt I could do better. When all the ribbons are rolled together and all you see is the thin edges of them, it really takes away from the effect of the colors. So I decided to improve on this. I prefer to use just two colors for a really sharp contrast, and stack two pieces of the same colored ribbon before rolling, instead of using four colors of ribbon. So I put a white ribbon on top of another white ribbon, then a red ribbon on top of them and another red on top of those. In this way, when I roll the spiral, the stripe of each color is twice as thick and therefore shows up more. You can actually see a swirl of two colors, instead of tiny bits of color all jumbled together that look like one dull color when you don't look at it from close up. I wrapped my pretty candy in a piece of wide sheer organza ribbon just as an edible candy would be wrapped in clear cellophane. I used a piece of white thread to knot around the two ends to create the typical twisted wrapper edge, knotting the thread tightly and trimming the excess so it's invisible. A dot of hot glue made this easier. Since I was using ribbon and not fabric, I didn't need to do anything to prevent the upper and lower edges of the candy wrapper from fraying. For the two cut ends, I brushed on some clear nail polish to prevent them from unraveling, something organza does very easily. Trim the edges and hanging threads, stick on a white-covered clip, and voila! Sweet enough to eat!
I will try to remember to upload a picture of that one.