Embroidered Headbands

There are a million tutorials out there to make these awesome headbands. But I haven’t seen any to make embroidered headbands. The sewing process is the same, but here’s a way to avoid lots of waste. The below design is my “Twists” design.

Make sure you use a border design—the longer the better. But you want to keep it around 1 1/2 inches wide—for kid or adult headbands. Your finished headband will be between 2 and 2 1/2 inches wide. don’t go wider, but of course you could go skinnier.

Take a piece stabilizer to fit your hoop. I use the crappy Pellon Stitch and Tear. It stabilizes and it is ‘heavy’ enough to use as an interfacing so I am doing two steps at once.

Cut a 3 inch wide piece of dupioni silk, or any other light-to-midweight fabric. For girls and women I cut it 18 long.  Sew the silk to the stabilizer. Yes, you could just spray it down with glue spray but I find that sewing it directly to the stabilizer  prevents any puckering on such a narrow piece of fabric. But hey, try it with the glue spray if you want.

Hoop and embroider! You’ll notice a pucker (above photo) in the silk where it is sewn to the stabilizer. No problem my friends! That will get cut off. I am not a perfectionist—life is too short for that nonsense.

After the embroidery is finished, remove from the hoop trim off the excess fabric, tapering the ends a bit.

Using your finished and tapered piece of silk, cut another piece using the embroidered one as a pattern. Place right sides together and pin, leaving a 4-6 inch opening on one side.

Cut a thin piece of elastic 4 1/2” long for girls and 6 1/2” long for women. I like to use black since we have darker hair. It looks better when the girls where a ponytail and a headband. But you can use any color. The only other color I’ve seen is white though. Slide the entire elastic piece  between the two layers of silk, having one raw edge of the elastic meet one raw end of the headbands end.

Stitch all the way around with a 1/2 inch seam allowance, leaving that 4-6 inch opening. Make sure you leave the one end without the elastic open as well! Turn right sides out, as seen below:

Tuck in your side opening, and end opening, and iron really well. Slide the other raw end of the elastic into the open end 1/2” and pin in place. Topstitch all the way around the headband, backstitch a few times at the elastic ends.

Iron and done! Not bad for 10 minutes of sewing, huh? (The embroidery part obviously took longer than 10 minutes though.)

Here’s another version embroidered with “Kaleidescopes” on twill fabric. (Oops! I forgot to trim the threads before picture taking!)

Happy Sewing!