I love being the mom of little girls. As a girly girl, I’ve always wanted daughters so that I can play dress up, pretend to have afternoon tea and buy lots of darling, pink frilly clothes. I love all that stuff! Now that I have two daughters and two nieces, I am living my dream! These days, we are having a blast playing “princess”. The elsa and anna capes we have are always on someone’s shoulders and Zoey knows all the Disney princesses now. I sense a trip to Disneyland is in the near future. My niece Rylie was turning two recently so I decided to sew her and Zoey their own princess crowns to wear to the birthday party. I made the crowns out of felt and wanted to make them both adjustable and reversible. It was important that the crowns were adjustable since the girls are growing so fast and I wanted them to be able to wear them for a long time. Being double-sided allowed them to pick which design they want to wear on that day. Rylie’s crown has the number “2″ to wear on the day of her birthday party and her initial “R” on the other side. Zoey’s crown has “Z” on one side and a “S” for Skylar to wear on the other side when Skye is older.
Here is what the front sides of the crowns look like:
And the other reversible sides:
To make these crowns, I spent $0. (Jeff is always happy to hear this.) I gathered up a bunch of supplies that I had left over from previous projects. I had a lot of felt from the felt Christmas ornaments I made last winter and a bunch of random trimmings:
I measured the circumference of Zoey’s head and made paper templates for the crowns. I made the crowns slightly different from each other. One is more angular and the other is curved:
Here is a downloadable pdf file of the crown_templates for anyone that would like to replicate these. The size worked well for an average size two year old head. (note: the template is just for one of half the crown. You need to cut out the template twice and tape the middle parts together to make a full crown)
Since the crowns I made are double-sided, I layered both layers of felt on top of each other and then traced and cut out the pattern:
Then I pinned the two sides together:
And sewed carefully around the edges:
For Rylie’s pink crown, I used pinking shears to cut around the edges for a more interesting perimeter.
In order to make the crowns adjustable, I added a small piece of elastic to the back. I made sure to stick one side of the elastic in before I sewed it and left the other end unsewn until I was ready to finish the crown:
Then came the fun part of decorating. This is where having a proclivity to save scraps and trims comes in handy!
I used my silhouette machine to cut the letters and numbers out of iron-on material and just ironed those on. I also added lots of glittery elements and ribbons because little girls can’t get enough of those! Princesses need sparkles!
Then I sewed the free end of the elastic to other end of the crown creating a full circle. I really liked adding some long ribbon around the base of the crown to tie a sweet bow at the back:
Here are my little 2 year old princesses wearing their crowns!
Happy 2nd birthday, my sweet Rylie!!
