Princess Crown for Dolly

My girl Lily is a princess with a big capital glittery pink puffy P. Bath time is a production, because first she has to take off the crown, the bracelet(s), the tutu, the necklace, the plastic high heels...you get the picture. A few weeks ago a lovely lady at our church found this sweet little pink crown at the Target One Spot, and she snagged it for Lily. She didn't take it off for days.

When I was on the hunt for Sawyer's Easter shoes, I hit up Target myself, and I saw that they had a purple one too. Lily's dress featured purple flowers, and I had planned to make her a matching headband from the scraps, but when I saw the purple crown, I knew she would be so much happier with it, and that much joy for $1 is always a good buy. :)

As you can see, she loved it, and she was in full on princess mode on Easter:

She really, really loved her doll with the matching dress, so I thought I would make Melody, as she named her, a crown of her own.

I started with a doll sized headband blank. I got these a couple of years ago from Really Reasonable Ribbon, and they were really reasonable! This is not an affiliate link and I'm not getting paid to talk about them, but I had a great experience with them and wanted to share. It was $4.49 for a dozen headbands, and they were super awesome to work with. Initially I checked out with a shipping charge of $4.50, but I got an email the next day that they were able to ship it for $3.75 and were revising my total. I love merchants like that! These are the perfect size to fit an 18" (think American Girl) doll, and I've made Lily several mommy-and-me sets over the last couple of years. 

This ribbon was in a bag of random ribbons someone gave me, and it was just what I was looking for. I started by snipping off about an inch and sealing the ends with a lighter.

Glue one end to the inside tip of the headband on one side.

Glue the sealed end of your ribbon (it may be easiest to just leave it on the

spool for this project) to the outside of the same end of the headband, perpendicular to the headband.

Then fold the other end of the short piece up over your long piece and glue it in place.

Then begin to wrap your ribbon around the headband, making sure to cover the end of the small piece of ribbon on the front. Can we please not talk about the horrifying state of my nails?

Keep wrapping, angling the ribbon a bit as you go so that the edge crosses the portion of ribbon under it about halfway across.

When you get close to the end, snip off another small piece of ribbon, fold it over the bare end of the headband, and glue it in place on both the front and the back.

Continue wrapping the headband until you get to the very end, making sure to finish with the ribbon on the inside of the headband. Seal the end and glue it in place.

For the crown, I cut a scrap of white felt, just eyeballing a good width for the size of the headband. I folded it in half and cut out some points to make a crown.

I had this weird vintage purple knit in my stash. I just laid my felt piece down on it and traced around it with my fabric marking pen on the wrong side of the knit. 

Sew wrong sides together, leaving most of the bottom open (sorry, forgot to take a picture of this step).Turn it inside out, using a pencil or something like this awesome turning tool to get the points. 

Tuck the bottom edges in and sew it closed with a very close seam allowance. You can topstitch the whole thing at this point if you'd like, but I felt like the thickness of the fabrics I chose would make this difficult to do neatly, so I skipped it.

It may look a little wonky at this point (or perhaps not if you're better than me, ha!), but it looks better once it has the headband to stabilize it.

Lily's crown has little jewels all over it, but because of the small size of this one, I opted to only add them to the points.

Use a small jewel for the center and tiny ones for each of the other points.

 These can just be hot glued on.

Run a bead of hot glue along the bottom edge of the crown and glue it to the headband.

The points of the crown should point up when the headband is laid on its side.

Lily was thrilled with it, and Melody looks quite regal if I do say so myself. :)

Those tiny pigtails are killing me! I went to get my hair colored Friday at my mother-in-law's beauty shop. Lily told her she wanted "a cuter look", so Nana hooked her up with some pigtails, and we've had to repeat it every day since. :)