Button and Fabric Barrettes

A while back, in one of my Reading the Whole Internet posts, I mentioned this post and its update, tutorials on making button and fabric barrettes. I made these for a niece's birthday a while back, but had plenty of trouble myself.



I ended up cutting a piece of fabric and stitching a pocket of sorts around the barrette. I first folded it up from the bottom so that the raw edge was as far into the open barrette as it could get. I then folded the top down and folded that raw edge under.

I gave very brief thought to machine stitching around the barrettes but quickly discarded that thought as the rigid barrettes would make that difficult. So, I hand stitched up one side and down the other of the barrettes. I then cut off the extra on either side, and used a liquid sealant (Fray Check, perhaps? Can't find it now-) to seal the raw edges on either side of the barrettes. Here's what they look like on the front and back:








You may notice that the ink I used to draw lines bled through - I actually re-did those. Then I went and bought a disappearing ink fabric pen! I used my hot glue gun to attach the buttons, trying to find that fine line between enough glue to hold it on and not too much that it doesn't stick well. As noted in the amendments, you can sew your button to a small scrap of fabric and then glue that onto the barrette.

Here are the finished products:

Pretty cute, I think! I also like the way the fabric covers the spot on the hem clip (which I used per the tutorial versus barrettes) where it is riveted together - I thought that might catch hair if a little girl just pulled them out instead of opening them.

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