Making a Head Band Out of Stretch Jean Cut Offs

Someone gave me a pair of capri stretch jeans and I didn't like the bottoms as they flared out some and wanted to cut them off and make them shorter.  
 
I have cut off many pants for the girls and usually cut a few off myself to work in the yard in the summer but I had never thought of using the stretch jeans as a headband before.

Once I cut off the bottoms, I thought it would make a cute head band and tried it on and thought it was rather comfortable. 


It had a seam in it as the bottom had a slit so I just used the zig-zag stitch on the machine to quickly sew up the slit. 

When cutting jeans, rather than cutting up the seam to get to the area to cut, I just take a pinch of fabric and cut it where I want to make the length of the shorts. Once there is a slit, as you can see me making in the picture, I slide the back side of the scissors into the hole and then cut. 

I don't usually do this on a person other than making the slit for the scissors. I then have the person take off the pants and I lay them flat on the floor. This makes it easier to get the front and the back of the pants even. 

This also makes it easy to match up the length of both legs as well. To make the shorts the same on both legs, fold the pants in half with one leg over the other. It doesn't matter which way you fold them as long as you match the top of the jeans and the bottom hems on both legs so your cuts will be at the same point in the leg on both legs. 

I didn't like how thick the headband was so I cut off one of the stitch marks quite close to the other stitch which made it just a bit thinner. 

If you need to make the headband smaller in size to fit a child, just measure it on their head, cut off a piece near the seam and stitch it up to fit the size of head of the child. I show Princess Four trying it on for size here before sewing the flower on.


After sewing the seam and cutting off a bit more of the hem, I took the little bit I cut off and threaded string through it after folding it over onto itself over and over. 

Once I had it threaded through the entire piece of jean, I pulled the thread and gathered the thing up like an accordion door. 

After I had the piece in a line but gathered, I started rounding it in a circle to make it into a flower. You could cut the other hem into larger strips and make a larger flower but I wanted to make two head bands out of the hems so I didn't want to cut more off or make the shorts any shorter so I just used the small piece I had but really, you could use larger pieces. 
 
I also thought about using a different color of jeans I have or using a silk flower or crocheting a flower to put on it but Princess Four wanted it out of the jeans so I went ahead and made the little strip into a flower and sewed it on the top side seam of the headband.

To make the accordioned piece into a flower, just start in the center and swirl the piece bigger and bigger and once you have it looking like a flower, you take thread of the same color and weave it through the center of the flower pieces stitching them together. 
 
The entire thing took me about an hour to make but I was being slow about it. Really, I could have made this in about 15 minutes but I was asking the girls how they wanted it and making option suggestions etc. 

Imagine how fun it was to see Princess Four wearing it to school yesterday. I kinda thought maybe she was just telling me it was cute to make me feel good but she actually wore it proudly. 

I guess some of my weird ideas actually work. Today was the first day Princess Four wore my sweater ghetto beanie that I made a week or two ago. Click here for that post. 

It was a cheap way to make a cute headband! Maybe I will make a crochet flower to put on the other headband and show that one later.