Girls Camp Craft: No-Sew Braided Headbands

One of the crafts we made at Girls Camp this year were no-sew braided headbands. I'd gotten some feedback from the young women that this was a craft they wanted to do. They'd been found on Pinterest, and when I went looking for these I had to do some problem solving.

When I first searched and saw so many results, I thought, "Perfect! I won't have any electricity at our campsite so I won't be bringing my sewing machine anyway..."

And then I actually read over some of the no-sew headband tutorials.

They all required hot glue guns. Hot glue guns?! Those require electricity too!!

But I didn't give up. I thought about how to make these headbands work anyway. I debated over hand sewing them, super gluing them, tying them in knots, etc.

And then I found the solution. It involved a material from one of the other crafts for the week: embroidery floss!

Here's how we made them:

I ripped my fabric strips into about 1 inch widths. They were all between 20 and 30 inches long.

(Tip: Ripping fabric for something like this is far easier and much quicker than cutting strips, but only for woven fabrics. Just snip the fabric at one inch intervals, then rip each snip to the other end. Plus, it gives a fabulous  frayed look to each braid.)

1. We safety pinned our fabric strips together and to the table cloth to braid them. It made them easy to work with. 

Once they're braided, safety pin the ends to keep the braid from unraveling. 

2. Take two skinny elastic hair ties and loop them together. (I recommend making sure the metal ends on them are on the outside where the fabric braid will cover them up.)

3. Safety pin one end of your braided fabric around one side of the elastic hair tie loops. 

4. Here's the no-sew, no electricity solution! Using an arm's length of embroidery floss, tie it in a knot somewhere between the safety pin and the elastic hair tie, making sure to leave about a 2- to 3-inch tail of the floss on one side of the knot and the rest of the length on the other side. 

Then, lay the short tail down along the braided fabric, and wind the longer tail of floss narrowly around the braid, keeping it between the safety pin and the elastic hair tie. Wind it really tightly!

Once you have only about 3 inches left of that longer tail, tie both ends of the floss together in a good ol' square knot. Trim the floss tails down to about a half or a quarter of an inch, and after removing the safety pin, trim any of the extra fabric as you desire.


5. Measure it around your head, looping the other side of the fabric braid through the other elastic hair tie, and once it's the right size, safety pin it into place. Repeat step 4 for this side of the braided fabric.

Voila! A legit, no-sew, no-electricity-needed, simple braided fabric headband!

One of the other leaders even used an extra strip of fabric instead of embroidery floss because we ran out of the color she wanted to use. Brilliant! There's no limit to what other kinds of supplies you could use for this method. 


And these turned out so cute. Some girls did one braid, others (including myself with the sample headband) did two braids. I love how they look on, and they stay in place pretty well too!

This one is for sale in my Etsy shop. Have a look if you're interested!