easy DIY hair bow elastics {great gift!}

At four years old, my daughter has finally (finally!) decided to start leaving clips, bobby pins, and elastics in her hair, as opposed to ripping them out five minutes after we finish the hairstyle that took three times as long as it should have to do. So I made her some hair bow elastics.

I know, this isn’t the first hair bow tutorial you’ve ever seen, but these were so easy to make and turned out so cute I decided to share them anyway. These would be a great gift for any little girl.

You have plenty of options for materials to make these simple DIY bow hair elastics out of: anything that doesn’t fray that’s thick enough to hold the bow shape will work. Felt is an ever popular choice because it’s available in tons of colors and it’s very cheap (a wool blend felt will hold up over time better, but acrylic felt will also work). I made the white bow out of a leather scrap cut from an old purse, and the gold bow is made from a remnant of home decor vinyl from Jo-Ann Fabrics.

The vinyl I had was actually light yellow. I spray painted it with some Krylon Gold glitter blast, then covered it with a poly sealant spray.

You could probably even use a quilting cotton as long as you ironed on fusible interfacing first.

Making a bow is crazy simple: just trace a bow template, cut out the piece, and hot glue together as shown:

I used a free gift bow template from How About Orange printed at 60%. What’s nice is that you can print the template at different sizes for different sized bows, and the post with the template also contains a free Silhouette cut file (just group the three pieces, then shrink them down so the longest piece is about 6 inches in length for a bow this size). I cut the vinyl version with my Silhouette. I chose the “thick fabric” setting, but put my blade on a 7 and also clicked double cut. I used tape around the edges of my vinyl to make sure it wouldn’t slide around on my mat. It worked like a charm!

Click here to learn how to make elastic hair ties!