Thursday, January 17, 2013

Perfect Hairbow Storage

Now that Meg's finally allowing me to style her hair, and she's rapidly acquiring a large collection of mama-made hair pretties, we needed to do something about the hairbow storage sitch. I've tried a number of things in the past, but nothing was quite right. I wanted to be able to display all the bows visually, by color, and have the flexibility to easily alter things as her collection changed. Oh, and I wanted it to be free, because I live in happy rainbow unicorn land. So this is what I ended up with:



I had an extra curtain rod and clip rings stored in a closet. Our previous house had a lot more windows than this one does. I simply grabbed a few ribbon scraps in a rainbow of colors, clipped them onto the rings, and hung them on the rod.

Excuse the blur. I was taking these pictures while holding Mr. Wiggles.




For the headbands, I clipped a narrow ribbon on top of a wider one and poked brads through them both at intervals. This formed loops that I could slide the headbands through.

*A note on ribbon choice for the hairbow-holding strands: I found grosgrain ribbon in 3/8"-3/4" to be the perfect ribbon for our clips. The grosgrain provides good grip. The thinner ribbons didn't have enough surface area to hold the alligator clips, and the wider ribbons were too wide to hold the pinchy clips.

We've been using this holder for a few weeks now, and I really love it! I think we've finally stumbled upon our perfect storage solution here.


Photobucket

4 comments:

Sansha said...

What a great idea. Do you think it is better with some sort of weight on the end of the ribbons to keep them somewhat taut?

What are the 'brads' that you poked through for the headbands.

And I've JUST made a whole heap of purple and gold clips for Hazie for school this year and it made me smile to see you doing the same.

Sansha said...

Also - do you use a hot glue gun? How do you stop the glue from just pulling out into an eternal thin strand. Whenever I use it, I can't get the damn glue to separate and the strand just gets longer and longer and longer. Is there a technique or is it just practice?

Laura Ingalls wannabe said...

I found that clipping a bow at the end of each ribbon was enough weight to keep them straight. In the picture, you can kind of see that the ones without a clip at the end have twisted, but the others haven't. Now that you mention it, though, if I had more follow-through, I might just glue a penny or something else small and heavy to the back of each ribbon end so I don't have to rely on the clips to do it.

The brads I used are scrapbooking accessories. They've got two straight prongs on the back that you poke through paper and then open up to keep in place. They have plainer ones in office supply stores, too.

I've found I have to ignore those obnoxious glue gun strands while I'm working and deal with them afterward. If I try to break the strand with the gun or pull at them while they're still wet, it just makes more and pretty soon my glue is drying and nothing is stuck together. Also, a hot melt glue gun works worlds better for me than the cool melt ones. It keeps the glue wet long enough for me to get things stuck and then work on string removal before everything sets. I don't know why they even sell cool melts, as they're frustrating and useless.

I use a glue gun begrudgingly. My new favorite glue is E6000. I'd never heard of it before this year, but it's wonderful. It bonds permanently and strongly. It manages to stick things together that would normally have you fiddling with a glue gun and then holding your breath and saying a few dozen prayers.

I'd like to see Hazel's clips! Your work is always so much more thorough and neat than mine turns out!

SJ Johnson said...

I will definitely show you my clips. I bought shower curtain rings today so I can make my rack!!