My fingers have been busy as of late, crafting for an upcoming birthday - my baby's first birthday.
I made my middle child a felt birthday crown a few years ago and wanted to do the same for my youngest. At that time, I asked my eldest if she also wanted a birthday crown, but she seems to have outgrown that stage, meaning she will never get a crown of her own.
While that makes me sad, I was able to celebrate her last birthday in a homemade way by creating a family birthday banner - to be brought out at each of our birthdays in celebration of the day. A visit to my local fabric store to grab a handful of fat quarters and double-fold bias tape gave me the ingredients I needed for creating it and I'm SO happy with how it turned out. If anyone is interested in how I did any part of it, I'd be happy to answer any questions!
But that isn't what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about the birthday crown I've made for my youngest. There is so much inspiration for felt birthday crowns out on the internet. I'll admit that I originally got the idea here from my favorite blogger, SouleMama.
I love working with felt. It is so easy to sew and so forgiving. I was inspired by my own Christmas stocking creations to applique my daughter's name on the crown. I free-hand pencil the letters on the felt and then cut them out with small scissors. My artist husband always compliments me on my felt letters, which makes me smile inside.
I had my middle-child's crown to use as a template but decided to construct this one a bit differently. I used three main pieces of felt: a full-sized outside "background" piece, a full-sized inside piece, and a smaller middle piece that's the same color as the lining. I started by appliquing the name on the smaller piece. I then stitched the flowers to the larger front piece. I created a fabric tube to cover the elastic and then stitched around the outer edge of the crown, joining front to back and catching the elastic and casing between the two, while at the same time sewing down the ribbon trim around the edge.
The one thing I didn't like about my middle child's crown was that when I made it, it was too big (even with the elastic) for her head, but it doesn't fit my eldest, even with the elastic - so it wasn't adjustable enough, even with the elastic. This time, I came up with a solution: I used some buttonhole elastic that I have for a batch of cloth diapers I'll be making soon. I put a buttonhole in the back layer of the crown felt (to hide the tail of the buttonhole elastic) and stitched a button to the outside of the hole (for buttoning the elastic to). I did this before stitching the back felt to the front felt (so all my stitches didn't come through to the front of the crown). I added a buttonhole to the fabric elastic sleeve so the buttonhole elastic can exit the band.
I love how the crown turned out and it should fit my little girl until she's outgrown wanting to wear it. As with all things you do by hand, there are always some lessons learned, and those are in particular what I want to share with you (maybe if you're reading this and decide you want to make your own crowns, you'll be able to avoid some of the problems I ran across because I shared them with you):
- I would have sewn the front to back excluding the little pom pon trim, and then gone back and hand stitched the trim in place. As it was, I thought I could stitch it on with a zipper foot, but even that wasn't thin enough to avoid having the foot catch the pom pons and have me sew too close to the edge of the felt. I had to go back and hand-sew the front-back together in some places because of this and it doesn't look at "finished" as I would have liked it because of that. Also, if I had hand-stitched the trim, I could have had more control over how well the trim turned the corners at the crown points.
- The ribbon that I sewed to the bottom of the crown - I forgot that I should have left a bit extra and folded it under to create a nice edge alone the sides (rather than what I did was to clip it off at the edge, exposing the rough edge of the ribbon)
