Due to all this amazingly awesome chaos in my life, I haven't done anything creative in a while; something that is changing post-haste. I have quite a few projects lined up that I'm very excited about. I won't be spilling the beans on them just yet though.
For now, take a look at these hair clips I made for my wedding day. They were quite easy, and the overall effect was both whimsical and elegant - contradictory in all things, as are my dear husband and I.
I started with a simple alligator clip, which I inserted a scrap of plastic or foil, depending on what was available at the time, inside the clip. This was to keep me from gluing the clip closed. A piece of paper would also work, though might be harder to pull away from the dried glue. You may end up with a tiny bit of it permanently inside the clip, depending on the kind of clip you use, but it won't show.
I then cut apart some fake flowers I purchased, and removed the heavy plastic bottom receptacle/sepal combo piece, and trimmed the stem as short as possible. I then hot glued the flowers to the alligator clip. As the sepal and stem are what keeps fake flowers held together, I had to put tiny dabs of hot glue between the layers of the petals, to keep everything from just falling apart. But hot glue works wonders! (I recommend a low-temperature hot glue gun - burns are no fun.)
The Crystal branches were a bit of a strange brainchild. I found some clear crystal drops at Michaels that were already shaped onto branches, which would have easily been glued on, but I wanted to add some ruby red Swarovski crystals into the mix. This meant untwisting the wire branches, pulling all the clear crystals off, and slowly rebuilding it my way. It would have been much simpler starting with fresh unused jewelers wire.
I made four clips in total - three were used in my hair, and one was clipped to the front of my red wrap dress as an accent on the sash.
