Chaela, Chaela, let down your hair!

My neighbor told me she wanted to see the process I go through to make my kids' costumes, so sorry people who don't care, you'll be seeing several blogs about it!

Today I tested my idea for giving Chaela her Rapunzel hair, because if it wasn't going to work I wanted time to think of something else. The idea was to get a ton of gold ribbon and braid it into her hair.

The process for braiding ribbon into hair is very simple; you cut double the length of ribbon of you want, fold it in half, and slip it onto a bobby pin. Then you cross a section or two of the hair (meaning just barely start the braid) and stick the bobby pin up in there behind it, then add the now-dangling ribbon to one of your three hair sections and braid like normal. Ta da! Very cute. See this post to see what that looks like.

Anyway, I decided to take that a step beyond with several bobby pins tucked all over Chaela's head and lots of ribbon.  Result:

Yay!  It worked so much better than I thought it would and was actually a tiny bit of a pain to take out once it was in, which is excellent because that means it won't fall out on its own when she's running around.  However, it's nowhere near as thick as I want and ribbon is relatively expensive, so the next step is to grab a skein of yarn that matches her hair and add a bunch of that.  If it doesn't work, that's ok, I know this does and if it comes down to it this is close enough.  Except it will look much nicer, I did this really fast and it's not very attractive.