Flower hair clips tutorial

I know that everyone and their dog is making flower hair clips for children. I am a little slow at jumping on the band wagon. For one thing I have had a hard time finding flowers that I really liked to make the clips. So this is a tutorial for how to make hair clips from one stem of fake flowers. I found this beautiful flower at Michael's craft store. I figured it had enough pieces to make at least 4 or 5 hair clips. The price of silk flowers is kind of high and you need to have more than one flower for each clip so this type of silk flower worked really well because it had 3 different sizes of petals all on one. Here is what I did.

1st Buy your hair clips. I had a hard time finding the old fashioned "alligator clips" that everyone uses for these (the ones the little grannies use to hold their pin curls in). I couldn't find them in any stores on our way to Canada but I figured if there is ever a place that carries anything that is outdated or not in high demand now in would be our Wal-Mart in Saskatchewan Canada. Everything seems to be about 3 year behind there. Of course they would have oodles of alligator clips for all the senior women who need them for pin curls. NOT!!!! Couldn't believe it. So this is the package that I got. I don't really like the design of them but they worked in the end.

2nd Cover your clip with ribbon. Start by putting the hot glue on the bottom and placing your ribbon like so (see picture and stay with me here)

Add a bit more hot glue and fold the ribbon back over itself (this make it less likely to fray) and continue gluing over the spring end. Make sure you don't get hot glue on the springs.

Continue over the top and down around to the underneath side but only to where the clip ends and the spring begins.

Like this.

3rd Get some of this grippy stuff. What in the world is this called? I tried explaining what I was talking about to my mom until I was totally frustrated and then when I found it she said "oh ya grippy stuff. I found it at the dollar store.

Cut a piece of grippy stuff as wide as your clip and as long as the underneath of the top side. Apply a small amount of hot glue to the ribbon and attach the grippy stuff. NOTE: after I made these and did the pictures for the tutorial and put it in Small fry's hair I realized that due to the design of these clips it would help to put some grippy stuff on the bottom underneath the spring part for extra hold.

Now because I loaded my pictures in the wrong order and don't want to take the time to fix them I am going to show you how to attach the finished flower and then I will show how to make the flower.

So 4th Apply hot glue to the ribbon on the top of the clip then press the flower down and hold. You want to place the flower so that the spring end of the clip is kind of tucked underneath.

Bottom view.

The finished product.

Now onto making the flowers.

1st You want to separate the flower petals and cut off any plastic attaching pieces. I used 4 petals for each clips. 2 large, one medium and one small.

2nd Starting with the largest first put a dab of hot glue in the center and attach the next pedal on top (slightly rotate your petals so they don't all lay directly over the other). I pinch the underneath side once I have them layered while the glue is still pliable. This gives the flower a bit more dimension I think.

Here is a picture of the pinched underside.

3rd Continue to add the other 2 petals in the same way.

4th I added a jewel to the center that I attached with hot glue. That is it.

The finished flower

And my beautiful model showing off her mom's creation.