Hi kids!
It’s been a while since our last post, but it’s still related to today’s craft tutorial. We first showed you how to make pretty wire flowers out of nail polish, and then how to use them to decorate items like hair clips!
You can store these hair clips in a box like we did, or you can make a pretty rainbow! 🌈🤗
When we were searching online for hair clips to decorate ourselves, we were repeatedly shown a rainbow with ribbons for storing hair clips. This cute idea was available for purchase, but our mom said we could make it ourselves!
So we thought about how this could work and simply tried it out, and we think it turned out great!
The rainbow isn’t difficult to make, but you do have to use a hot glue gun to glue some of it together, and you always need an adult there, otherwise you could get badly burned.
Otherwise, you’ll need materials you might not necessarily have at home, like thick yarn (like the kind you use for macrame) or lots of different ribbons. However, if you have a lot of hair clips at home, a rainbow is a great storage idea, and it’s worth stocking up on the materials.
Now we’ll show you how we did it!
You need:
Thick yarn (e.g., macramé yarn) – you can actually use any kind of cord, wool, or yarn. However, the thinner the yarn, the more often you’ll need to wrap it.
strong paper, cardboard
pencil and scissors
a small wooden pole in the size you want the rainbow to be (you can also look for branches, as long as they are straight and don’t break easily)
adhesive tape
Pompoms for the clouds (if you don’t have any, you can also cut clouds out of foam rubber or felt)
many different ribbons
Hot glue gun
If you want a template for the rainbow, you can download it HERE ⬇️
- Our DIY rainbow template is intended to show you how to draw the arches and the backing, to which the stick with the ribbons will be glued. If you want to use the template exactly, your stick should be about 15 cm long. You can also draw the rainbow yourself.
The rainbow consists of 3 arches and a back part that holds the arches together.
If you draw a rainbow yourself, it should be about the same size from end to end as the length of your stick. Draw the outer arch about a centimeter smaller than the stick, as the rainbow will be slightly larger once you wrap the yarn around it.
We placed the sticks along the edge of the cardboard and simply drew the rainbow on them. For one, the arches were thinner, for the other, slightly thicker.
It’s not important that you draw the arches so beautifully. What we noticed later, after we had wrapped the yarn around the arches, was that the yarn caused the arches to be a bit farther apart, and therefore, when pushed together, they no longer formed a straight bottom edge. Therefore, we had to trim the edge. You can see that in the pictures.
Therefore, the arc distance is taken into account in the template.
2. Cut out the arches.
3. As we thought that the cardboard was not strong enough, we wrapped the sheets with adhesive tape to make them a little more stable.
3. Now glue the beginning of the yarn to one end of the arch. Glue a few centimeters along the arch in case you need to trim the bottom edges of the rainbow later.
4. Now wrap the yarn around the arc.
4. You can fix the yarn in some places along the arc with hot glue to prevent it from slipping.
5. At the end, fix the yarn with hot glue, just like at the beginning of the arc.
6. Wrap all three arches with yarn.
7. Then push the arches together and use the chopstick to check whether the bottom edge is straight.
8. If not, trim the bottom edge. It doesn’t have to fit perfectly, as you’ll glue the clouds over the edge later, and then they won’t be visible.
9. Before you glue the arches together, you need to attach the hanger.
10. Attach a hanging loop to the center of the outer arc. Tie a piece of yarn, preferably the same color as the bow, into a loop in the center and pull the ends through.
11. Now it’s time for the back of the rainbow. Push the rainbow’s arches back together and hot-glue the back to the rainbow, leaving a piece as wide as the stick sticking out at the bottom edge. It’s best to refer to the template to see what this means.
12. Now hang various ribbons on the stick. We used lace and silk ribbons.
Cut the ribbons to size. Since you’ll be folding them together in the middle when hanging them, you’ll need to leave them twice as long. This means that if you want the ribbons to be about 40 cm long when they’re hanging from the stick, you should cut ribbons that are at least 80 cm long (the loop on the stick will shorten them by a few centimeters).
13. Fold the ribbons together in the middle to form a loop, which you then wrap around the stick. Push both ends of the ribbon through the loop in the middle, pull tight, and the first ribbon is hanging.
Some of the straps didn’t stay in place completely, so we used a bit of glue to help things along.
14. Add as many ribbons as necessary until the entire stick is full.
15. Now glue the stick to the back of the rainbow. Apply plenty of hot glue where the back extends over the rainbow and glue the stick and ribbons to it.
16. Now you can cut the ribbons to the same length.
17. To hide the transition between the rainbow and the sticks, we hot-glued pompoms over them.
Instead, you can also cut out clouds from felt or foam rubber and stick them on, and you have a rainbow ready to store your hair clips!
Have fun making it!
