Headband Organizer in Less than 15 minutes?

This one is for my girls. Last summer, we had headbands everywhere. I mean one time I found a headband under my pillow. What was it doing under my pillow? My best guess is that it was probably a hidden treasure or else it got lost under there in the midst of a pillow fight or mattress trampoline party. Either way... we had headbands all over. I needed a place where we could keep the headbands in a neat spot. Now... headbands and neat don't really belong in the same sentence, so what is a busy mom to do? Pin it, of course! I searched "Headband Organizer" and this is what I found...

Pic from http://sunnytuesday.blogspot.com.au

So I thought I would give it a try. What the heck. All I needed was some headbands (no problem there!) old ribbon (I think I have some laying around), and 15 minutes (everyone has 15 minutes!). Can't be that bad, right? 

WHAT YOU'LL NEED:

Ribbon - about 18 inches or a little more (make sure you have enough or you will have a really short hanger!) It's going to be doubled over, so if it looks long, that's okay!

Buttons

Needle and thread

Flower or other embellishment (you don't have to have this, I added it)

15 minutes

Okay, well my first mistake was underestimating the amount of ribbon I'd need. I grabbed a cute piece of ribbon and realized about halfway into the project that it was WAY too short. Great. Because I have so much time to go digging for more ribbon. But I dug. And I found this...

Not my favorite but it would do. Buttons - got a lot of those! Needle and thread. Yup. Okay we're in business. My second mistake was reading the "15 minutes" part and taking that at face value. Hindsight is 20/20. Onward into the fog... I began this project in the wee hours of the morning while my kids were still asleep. I find it is really the only time I can actually get anything done. Especially crafts. When I start something and my kids are up, they're like, "Mom, what are you doing... Mom... Mom... Mom can I help? Mom? Can we do a craft too? Mom.... MOoooooOOm! I'm hungry. When are we eating breakfast?" So you see my dilemma.

Anyway, I thought 15 minutes... okay. it's 6:00, I have at least a half an hour before one of them wakes up. So there I was with my ribbon and my buttons. I started sewing the buttons on, as per the tutorial. And I sewed... and sewed... and sewed. Maybe I'm just REALLY slow at sewing buttons on? In reality, this took me close to an hour. An hour!! 4x the amount of time it said it would take. In it's defense, at least one of my kids woke up mid-project. So it could have taken 45 minutes. Still... I got it done and it turned out pretty decent!

COST: $$ Pretty cheap. I already had a lot of the stuff I needed but even if you had to buy the ribbon, needle, thread, buttons... you'd still only spend $5-$7.

DO-Ability: ++ Pretty easy. If you are not a person who sews, you might add another degree to this. Even for the amateur seamstress, I would still consider it pretty easy. You're just sewing on buttons. The hardest part is making sure the ribbon doesn't bunch up.

WELL...?: It's a pretty good project. It was cheap and easy (wait... that didn't sound good...). It did NOT take 15 minutes. The person who came up with it must have magic sewing fingers or a sewing machine that gets the buttons on there. If you're sewing the buttons by hand like I did, it will take longer than 15 minutes, so plan for that! All in all, my girls' headbands are now neatly organized, a feat I thought could not be accomplished! Another nice thing is you can hang one headband through each loop that you make, so it stores a LOT of headbands (which is good for us).

GOOD THINGS: Easy, cheap (is there a record player skipping somewhere...?), supplies are easy to find, GREAT organizer.for other accessories as well (clips, flowers, etc.)

BAD THINGS: The time thing is deceiving, might be hard if you don't have experience sewing on buttons.

PIN OR BUST?: Pin this one! Although the 15 minutes was not the actual time it took me to make this project, an hour is still not bad. Plus, like I said before, I had some "help" the last few minutes. I could have finished it in about 45 minutes. Overall it was pretty simple to make and I think my "helpers" could even assist me next time (although I may need to block out a little more time for that one!).

FINAL THOUGHTS: I said before I added the purple flower on the top (see below). I think I really added to the hanger and made it a little prettier for my girls. Plus, I had a flower hanging around that the clip fell off of (and no amount of hot glue would make it stay on again!). So if you have something laying around, the embellishment is nice. Wow... I never thought I would write that much about headbands... Aaaah motherhood. I love it! Happy Pinning!