How to Make ‘Pencils’ to Tie Your Hair Back With

Having watched MissPrincessPancakes’s video on Youtube entitled How to tie your hair back with a pencil, it has inspired me to make ‘pencils’. The video explains that when you just need to tie your hair up but you can’t find a hair elastic or slide, that a pencil or any similar object can be used to hold your hair up. The video demonstrated how this is achieved, but the steps are…

Gather your hair together in a pony tail.

Put the pencil on top of the ponytail base with the nib to the right and wrap the tail up and around the end of the nib end of the pencil.

Next, twist the pencil around as though you are turning a cooker knob. The nib should pass over the top of the pony tail base.

Finally, you need to turn the pencil so that the nib is facing the starting point again, but instead of twisting, the nib needs to turn in towards the head and go through the base of the ponytail and out the other side.

It does take some practise to do, buy watch the video and try it yourself. It doesn’t take long to master, and it does hold your hair up really firmly and it doesn’t damage the hair like tight hair elastics can.

Once I had got the hang of tying my hair up a pencil, I wanted to find something nice to tie my hair up with. The Video suggest using a chopstick, a fork, and of course a pencil, this is great if you have nothing else to hand, but to wear your hair to go out in this style, you would look a bit kooky.

It is this that inspired me to make an alternative.

To make these hair ‘pencils’ you will need...

6mm Dowel Available cheaply at B&Q costing around 60p
Beads, ribbons and exciting things to decorate your pencil with.
Strong glue and sandpaper.

Cut the dowel into pencil length pieces at around 19cm.

Then with a Stanley knife cut the tip of the dowel as if you were sharpening a pencil, making sure that you are cutting away from your body. You want to shape the end to a blunt point. Then sand the point and the rest of the dowel so that it is smooth and wont pull on the hair as you push it into your hair style.

Next comes the fun part – decorating the end. I tried a couple of designs dangling beads, a bumble bee and ostrich feather and flower.

To create the dangling beads I took lengths of thin ribbon, on one end of the ribbon I glued a small bead and the other ends of the ribbon I glued the ends altogether into a bigger bead. Next glue another bead onto the end of the stick, and then stick in place the bead filled with ribbon ends, and leave to dry.

When using beads, you may need to ‘sharpen’ the decorated end of the dowel to make it thin enough to feed beads onto.

The bumble bee is simply two bead stuck onto the end of the dowel. I drew some stripes on the yellow bead with a black permanent marker pen and I glues on some wobbly eyes to give him a fun character. The bee’s wings are simply a piece of transparent silver ribbon folded into an ‘M’ shape. I then sewed a few running stitches along the bottom of the ‘M’ to hold the two ends and the central part together and to gather them. Then I put glue on the gathers and stuck on the bees back and left it to dry.

The ostrich feathers are just a section of ostrich feathers wrapped around the end of the dowel and glued into place. I held it with a peg whilst the glue dried and then I stuck a ribbon rose on top of the feathers where the ends joined.

The great thing about these hair accessories is that you can use anything to decorate them. One Idea I had was to get Hello Kitty danglies from the slot toy egg vending machines that you see in supermarkets. Hello Kitty hair accessories would be so cute.

Top Tip – I found that standing the pencils in a glass was great when leaving them to dry.

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How to tie your hair back with a pencil

Perfect Valentines :: Tea Cosy Folk :: Santas Postbag::Halloween Mania :: Swindon Flowers ::Zafyna :: Connect2Business

How to make a Medieval Hair Braids Hair Piece

In medieval times, hair braiding was popular, and many attractive hair styles could be achieved with hair braiding. However, such elaborate braided hairstyles were usually worn by the rich, who had a lady in waiting or a servant to style their hair for them. If you don’t have a lady in waiting but want to achieve the medieval braided hair look, its probably best if you make yourself a braided hair piece that you can slip onto your head a bit like a hat or a wig, and instantly have the latest medieval fashionable hair do.

To make a Medieval Hair Braids Hair Piece you will need,

3x Platted Alice bands or hair bands, (the ones with two plats,) in a colour that matches your own hair,
Needle and thread
Fascinators,
Dress making pins, the ones with coloured beads are best because they are nicely visible in the hair braids.

To start with you need to join two of the hair bands together so that there are 4 plats that will go across your head. Snip the elastic out of one hair band and sew the end of the plats to the main hair band.

The next part is easier if you get someone else with a similar sized head to wear the hair band, Or if you wear it and ask someone else to do the pinning for you. The model should have their hair loose, so any pins wont attached the braids to their hair.

Put the 4 braided hair band on the models head, and space out the braids so that the lie evenly between the forehead and the crown of the head. If the braid at the crown is too long and wont lie flat, make a little loop out of the excess and lay inwards towards the forehead. Pin in place without stabbing the models head.

Next you need to dismantle the final hair band, taking everything off so that you are just left with braids. The ends of the braids should be melted together, if you disturb the ends, sew them back together with some similar coloured cotton.

Tuck one end of the loose braid behind one side of the surplus loop braid. The end should be hidden behind. Then bring the loose braid forward in a downward angle crossing over all of the main braids on the head, then take the braid down in front of the first braid in the set of four and turn at the ear again crossing over all the four main braids. Then on the back behind the forth braid, travel back up to the starting point and tuck the end of the braid behind another to hide it. Where the loose braid crosses other braids, pin it in place. Repeat this process on the other side to match.

Remove the hair piece carefully from the models head. Then sew the braids together where ever there is a pin. Keep the stitches small so that you can’t see them.

Now you can add fascinators to the braids. Bear in mind, that if you are wearing a tiara, you probably need to cluster the fascinators behind the ear, but if you don’t have any medieval head gear, you can add the fascinators around the top and front of the hair piece.

Perfect Valentines :: Tea Cosy Folk :: Santas Postbag::Halloween Mania :: Swindon Flowers ::Zafyna :: Connect2Business