Simple Hair Bow Clips

My youngest daughter has very fine, curly hair.  It's always hanging in her face, which drives me nuts.  I usually comb a large fringe section into a bunch, and tie it up neatly.  Sometimes it's nice to use a clip, but most hair clips just slide right out of her hair.  The only kind that stays neatly in place are the small metal alligator clips, with grosgrain ribbon bows on them.  Like these ...

Unfortunately Samantha has a habit of taking out her hair clips and losing them.  Decent quality hair bow clips aren't cheap, so it made sense to have a go at making them myself.  There are loads of tutorials out there for making hair bow clips.  Some are simple styles, some are incredibly fancy.  I found this great tutorial for a fairly simple style bow.

Simply Couture Boutique

I made an even simpler version of this bow by having just one bow loop on each side, rather than the two in the tutorial.  I started by making eight navy blue bows, that could be worn to school.

I found it surprisingly hard to photograph something so small and dark coloured.  Not my best photographs!

These bows are great - they don't fall out.  They have also lasted well, and we still have five left.  Since the first batch were so successful, I decided to make some pink ones.  You can't go wrong with pink!  Surprisingly I've found it really hard to get the two widths of ribbon (9-10mm, and 20-22mm) in many interesting colours.  I ended up with this selection.

I ended up choosing plain white to cover the alligator clip, and I also used it for the knot with the lighter pink ribbon.  For the bright pink striped ribbon, I folded the ribbon in half for the knot.  I would really like to have found matching ribbon in the narrow widths, but it just wasn't available.

These are the finished bow clips being modelled by Olivia and Samantha.

You can't see Samantha's hair very well in this shot, but we call her The Wild Woolly (it's a Bottle Top Bill reference).  She has curly, fluffy hair, and every morning it's a huge tangled mess.  I love using a little clip like this, because it keeps the hair out of her eyes.

These bows are so easy to make and you don't need a lot of supplies.  I bought small alligator clips from Amazon and Grosgrain ribbon from John Lewis.  I also used a needle, strong thread, a glue gun and a candle.  The candle was used to seal the cut edges of the ribbon to prevent fraying.