Celebrate Green Blog

by Lynn

I love our garden in the summer even though it’s not what one would call a showpiece with its weeds and mole hills.

Still, there are enough flowers here and there to make me happy. And there are enough for several craft projects. One of my favorites is making flower crowns or this year, headbands.

In the past, I’ve made full crowns with our grandgirls, where we wove the base from grass or hay or simply braided together flowers with long stems and inserted smaller ones between. While this is fun, it’s a little bit more complicated than this summer’s project, decorating ready made fabric headbands. (If you have a girl in your family, no doubt, you’ve got a pretty good stock of headbands from which you can pull.)

The whole project took less than a half hour.

We spend 10 minutes gathering flowers, talking about their qualities and admiring them. Then we got to work at a table I’d set up on the grass.

The process could not have been more simple.

First we divided the flowers and separated them according to color (more or less).

The girls then selected a flower, placed it on the headband and wound a small piece of wire around it before adding the next and so on until they had covered as much or as little as they wanted with the flowers.

Generally I wouldn’t use wire—certainly wouldn’t buy it, but I had some left over from another project and it’s much easier to handle than say thread, string or ribbon, all of which I’ve used before.

It was fun to see their choices and the final products which they then played with for hours, pretending they were fairies living in our bushes.

Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are mother and daughter and authors of Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and founders of Green Halloween®.