"Oh, I thought those flowers were made of your hair..."

I bought a bunch of stretch lace last year but after washing a pair of panties made of it I found out it gets ruined very easily. I was pretty disappointed with that because if I make things out of it for anyone but myself, I can't guarantee they will wash them carefully enough.

Fast forward to now. I saw this tutorial a few weeks ago, and decided to give it a shot. In my excitement for finding a project that wouldn't need to be washed much (if at all) I cut several dozen strips of lace. This part went pretty quickly since I didn't have to worry about the cuts being perfect.

My machine didn't gather the lace up on it's own as the tutorial suggests no matter the settings, so I had to gather every strip of lace after sewing it. I then sewed them into the flower shapes instead of gluing, but glued them to the 1/4" fold over elastic (which is 1/2" unfolded as shown below) with some fleece circles like the tutorial suggests.

I went to a party wearing this and a couple friends thought I had somehow braided my hair up into the headband until they saw it close up. The color match with my hair is ridiculously close.

I used five flowers for the headband. The elastic is just tied in the back so it's easily adjustable. You'll also notice my flowers are two colors. I layered a 1.5" strip of cream lace over a 3" strip of the pink when sewing the gathering stitches to get this two-color effect.

I then made a second one in black because I thought this would be a great accessory for girly goth outfits:

Like I said about cutting the lace, I made a whole lot of these flowers. After doing the headbands, I turned some into clips as well:

These large clips are a bit sharp so I was hesitant to use them, but they stay really well even in my thin hair.

Here's all the colors I ended up with. These flowers turned out to be a pretty good way to use up a bunch of lace I couldn't use for much else.