Make a Unicorn Horn Flower Crown

Because who should have to decide between a flower crown and a unicorn horn? Kaia really wanted to wear both for her Birthday, and this is what I ended up with. 

When she first told me she wanted to be a unicorn for her Birthday party, I started poking around the Web, trying to figure something out. I was really disappointed with what I found. I didn't want her to be encumbered by a big, hot, bulky costume for her indoor party. I wanted something she could don on her own when she wanted to play. I didn't want a modeling clay horn held on with an "invisible" elastic band. These just don't seem practical to me for a young child. I wanted a horn that would go on easily and comfortably, one that was lightweight, was not fragile, and would stay in place well on her head while she cantered around the house wildly, rearing and jumping. Because you know that is what is going to happen when you place a unicorn horn on a 4 year old. (Omygosh, she's almost four!) I think I actually achieved all of these standards I set myself, and I am really happy with how the whole thing came together, (and so is she!)

When I made the horn, I was thinking I would experiment a bit, start figuring things out. I didn't expect to be happy with the first thing I twiddled with, so I'm stuck without any pictures. I made a paper model in order to do this tutorial. Not the prettiest pictures, but hopefully they at least make the process easy to see.

You will need:

• Craft Felt in Various Colours
• Stuffing
• Sewing Thread and Needle
• Extra Strong Quilting Thread
• Small Length of Elastic
• Headband
• Hot glue
• Scissors
• Plastic Gems
• Fabric Leaves (Or Make Felt Leaves)

 I used sparkly white craft felt for her horn. Aside from the fact that it is, obviously, sparkly, the sparkle felt is quite a bit stiffer. Cut out a skinny triangle and fold it in half lengthwise, right sides together. Sew up the open long side, marked with sharpy in the following pictures. Leave the bottom open. (That triangle was supposed to be relatively symmetrical. The real thing was, I swear. Pretend that it is relatively symmetrical, okay? Thanks.)

Trim off excess fabric, and turn right-side-out. Using extra strong quilting thread, cut a long piece, (enough to wrap your spirals,) and knot off the end. Make it a good, big knot, you don't want it to pull through the felt once there is tension on it. Run the thread out near the tip of the horn from inside. (Not at the tip.) Pull it all the way through, so that knot is the only part left inside. Stuff the horn as tightly as you can, I used polyfill stuffing. Trim the bottom to even it out if necessary.

Begin wrapping the thread down the horn in a spiral, tightly enough to leave a good indent. This will give your horn a nice spiraled shape, and keep the thread from slipping and sliding around on the horn. (This was the part I was most unsure about. I worried that the fabric would bunch, or that the thread would not be strong enough to pull tightly, or that it would not stay in place. None of those fears came to light, it worked very well.) Tie your thread off inside, near the bottom of the horn. Place your horn on another piece of matching felt, trace the bottom circle, and cut it out. 

Starting from the inside, wrap stitches around the edges of your felt, sewing the circle to the bottom of the horn, and tie it off. Try to hide your knot inside, or at least away from the edge.

I attached it to a nice, wide, cloth-covered headband that we found at a dollar store. To do so, measure a piece of elastic around the center of the headband to get your length, then make it a bit smaller so that it will stretch snugly into place. Sew the elastic ends together to form a loop. Stitch the elastic to the bottom of the horn. Take care to sew the elastic all the way to the edges of the horn, or the base will pull up at the front and back. Also make sure that the seam holding the elastic together gets sewn to the horn, this way it will end up on top of the headband, instead of as an uncomfortable lump against your child's head.

Your unicorn horn is complete! Like magic, the paper horn suddenly transforms into a real one! Oh, wait... *ehem* Anyway, once on the headband, I added a little hot glue under the edges of the horn to help keep it from wobbling any. I think this would be remedied by using a wider elastic band than what I happened to have on hand, though.

 Hot glue the fabric leaves down either side of the headband, overlapping a little and alternating direction. Cut a variety of flowers out of the coloured felt. (Tip: Your husband may get slightly irritable if you attempt to do this in bed, stick to reading a book.) I honestly think layering has the biggest impact on how nice they come out looking. I used hot glue to fix the layers together. I've no idea how well hot glue works on wool felt, but it works amazingly on eco felt. I believe the heat actually fuses the layers together to an extent. For the large yellow flower, I simply cut a bunch of strips of felt, folded them in half, then tacked them all together by their ends with a little thread.

Hot glue the flowers all over the headband, then hot glue the plastic gems to the centers. Make sure to overlap the base of the horn a bit and cover up the elastic band. You are the proud new owner of a unicorn horn flower crown!

I had a very hard time keeping her still long enough to take any pictures...

Her rainbow unicorn tail is now complete, too, and I have a full blown unicorn galloping around the house all day. Find that tutorial here. By the way, it would be really easy to stick a couple ears in there amid the flowers. According to Kaia, however, she already has two ears and didn't want any more. (Don't look at me... she wears plenty of other animal ears, my logic does not often have much effect on her, however.)

Felt Barrettes

While Kaia's Haircut touch-up went pretty well, she's still got a pretty good patch on the one side of her head that really needs to come in. While I was getting the felt out for the ring of gnomes, I found a package of barrette backings and I thought that would be just the thing... you know, for when we're out and I don't want anyone asking if my kid's got mange.

 I had the felt and hot glue gun out, so I got to work cutting, sewing, and gluing.

  We threw in some lose beads, shiny things, and tulle.

 We dissembled a fake flower and used some bits of that here and there, too. I made what Kaia wanted me to make, and I hope that will also mean she wants to wear them.

 I drew some inspiration from our Earth gnome, whom, I will admit, I've always been particularly pleased with the outcome of.
 

They keep the hair nicely over the spot she really hacked up. Now I will just have to see if they will stay in.

Little Ring of Gnomes

I made this little ring of gnomes for our seasonal table following the tutorial by Rhythm of the Home, aren't they sweet? I gave them a little garden full of sprouts to circle, and made them in the tones of the earth.

They are being watched over by one of the elemental gnomes I made for Kaia some time back. Earth gnome is a little worse for the wear, but all in all, I think he's come through 2 1/2 years of hard play pretty well.

We'll be adding more to the table as the season sets in, but they're a nice start.

 

Bouquet of Felt Flowers

Miss Kaia wanted to pick flowers to give her Papa when he got home from work. Alas, there are no flowers in bloom around our house, so I thought we'd try to make some. As these grey November days wear on, I am enjoying their splash of summer colour more and more. I think I may need to make some more to add to them. As this began entirely experimentally, I started with eight.

We brought out my bag of felt scraps.. the little ones I wasn't sure I should actually be saving but maybe could stuff something with. I have such a hard time throwing away any amount of cloth. Kaia picked out a couple colours - she wanted red and orange - and we set to work. I grabbed some yellow and greens for the leaves and flower centers as well and cut them all to shape. We went simple, I will try extravagant with the next batch. ; ) And layers, these would be fantastically fun with layers.

Fold each of your flowers in half and cut a very small slit in the center.
Do the same for your leaves, except make your cut toward one end of the leaf.

I had been planning on threading these onto green pipe cleaners, but when it came time, would you believe I couldn't find any? Absurd! (Also, one should probably gather their intended materials for a craft before getting half way done and finding one does not actually posses them.) In any case, in my search I did find cloth florists wire, which I did not know was around. It looks like florists wire wrapped tightly with thread and perhaps has a bit more class than green pipe cleaners, lol. Absolutely a nicer looking stem. They were quite long and I cut them in half.

Using a pair of pliers, twirl one end of your wire into a flat spiral and feed your flower and then leaves on. Once all pieces were on, I did also double back on itself the very bottom of the wire so there would be nothing pokey while being played with.

Although not yet done in this photo, I eventually added a dob of glue to the underside of the bottom point on the leaves and tacked them down so they would stay in place.

I actually quite liked the look of the cute little spirals and hesitated to glue on the yellow circles, but in the end I did. One little drop of hot glue in the center, pressed in place.

And your flowers are ready to be loved on, handed around, played with and gifted! She did excitedly present them to her Papa when he arrived home after playing with them all day, but the moment he set them down she stole them back. : )

They now reside in a little vase on her kitchen counter when they are not being played with. I think they look quite lovely.

This was a very quick and simple project with ample reward. Without a doubt we will have fun inventing more flowers and sharing them with our friends in the long, flowerless Winter.

Felt Crowns

Kaia's much loved paper crown (as pictured here, up-side-down and backwards,) has seriously about had it. All of its sequins have fallen off, as has most of the glitter, and it's been taped more times than I can count. It was time for something a bit more durable.

I measured out three symmetrical spikes on a piece of paper. The center spike is about 2 1/2 inches tall. You could go with all sorts of fanciful shapes, which I think would be really fun to play around with. Later. :) For my first try, though, I thought I would keep it simple. I have a habit of making projects unnecessarily complicated and then never completing them, so with a 3 month old baby on my hands, (not to mention the 2 1/2 year old!) I'm trying to keep things finishable. I banished any thoughts of spires and dragons spewing flames, (for the time being!) connected my dots, and called it good.

I cut it out and tried it on the little Miss's head. I originally cut out from the tips of the spikes to the bottom of the paper, and it was just too big. I hacked off another inch or so off the bottom and tried it on her again, it was good! This only wraps to just behind her ears, the back of the crown will be made with a strip of a broken stretchy headband we have.

Once we had it right, Kaia picked out what colours of felt she wanted and I traced the paper pattern onto felt using chalk. I would have preferred fabric chalk, but sidewalk chalk was what was within reach. ;) I cut a straight edge on the brown felt for the backing. Then I cut the purple felt a little bit smaller, and used pinking shears along the top edge.

I also cut out a handful of various star and flower shapes, with little circles for the centers. I free-handed  these, but you could easily use a stencil, or even print some out.

Cut interfacing just a tad smaller than your front material and any shapes you want to put on and iron everything into place. I laid a paper towel over top of my material to protect it, especially since I am using the eco-felt made from recycled plastic bottles. I can imagine what a horrible, melty, sticky mess it could make!

I had her hold it up on her head again for me, and I measured to see how long of a strip of elastic we would need. As I mentioned before, we are using a broken stretchy headband we had kept for this purpose. I tacked that into place with fusible interfacing as well.

(If you don't have one you want to use and don't want to buy one to cut up, you can use a strip of elastic and sew a case for it instead. Measure your elastic in the same way, then cut a strip of felt a bit longer and a little over twice as wide. Simply fold in half and sew shut along the long seam. Turn it right-side-out, run your elastic through, and continue in the same manner. This is what I am planning on doing for the crown I will be making for my nephew.)

 Looking good! Now it's time to secure everything. I should have pulled out my machine for this, but that seemed like a lot of work at the time and it scares me anyway. Some day I will have a place for it to stay out and perhaps then I will be more willing to jump on it more often. As it was, I hand stitched the entire thing, which added to the length of this project considerably. Any further crowns I make I am definitely getting the machine out for. It would take a lot less time to get it out and put it away than I spent on stitching this. (Although I have to admit, I do like the look of the hand stitching...) Anyway, I went for contrast and used purple thread on the brown felt, and vice-versa.

Embellishing time! I didn't want anything too much, but I did glue a little "gem" onto the center of the front star / flower, and sewed a small cluster of little glass seed beads onto the little flowers on the sides.

(center)

(sides)

Now it's finally time to play! She's had so much fun with it already, and I'm sure it has a lot more lovin' to come. Now to finish a couple more crown and wand sets for my niece and nephew's birthdays. I'll tack their pictures on here when I complete them, and also get a post done about wands, they're too much fun!

This is how the little one passed out tonight <3