Ribbon Headband Organizer

This week's project came from a need to store my headbands someplace other than the shallow drawer in my bathroom vanity.  I broke one that got caught in the drawer and snapped in half, so it was time to find a new place for my headbands.  I decided to make a ribbon organizer for them.

You'll need:

3-4 feed of grosgrain ribbon

a keyring or d-ring

a glue gun and glue

I didn't have any d-rings floating around, but I did have a bag full of keyrings, so I used them instead.  I folded the end of my grosgrain ribbon over the keyring and glued it in place with hot glue.

Next up you'll have to decide how big you want your loops.  All of my headbands are skinny, so I knew I didn't need to make big loops.  I ended up using a pick comb as a template because it just happened to be lying on the table.  It actually worked out really well, but you could easily take a piece of cardboard that was 3 or 4 inches wide and use it instead (just make a mark on it when you decide how big your loops should be so they are all the same size).  I used the width of my comb between each loop that I made, and I used the tines on the comb to tell me how big to make each loop.  For each loop I folded back the ribbon and put my finger on the 4th tine.  Then I ran a line of glue on the ribbon along the front edge of the comb (as seen below).

Then I folded the ribbon back over my finger and pressed it into the glue to dry (be careful--the glue is hot).

I repeated this step until I ran out of ribbon. My ribbon was about 4 feet in length when I started and ended up about 3 feet long when I was done. Below you can see a photo of the loops I created.  They are a little over an inch in size.  If you have larger headbands, you may want to make your loops more like 2 inches, but this size worked great for my small headbands.

Once the loops were created, then they need to be glued down so they'll lay flat.  Just put a dot of hot glue below each loop and press it down so that it's in line with the ribbon.  Sometimes the loops were a little crooked and needed to be wiggled a bit into place.  I'm sure if I had used a straighter, less flexible template for my loops, they would have turned out a bit straighter.

After they are glued down, they lay relatively flat like in the photo below.

At that point you can decide how you want to finish the bottom--with a loop, or just folding the bottom of the ribbon over and gluing the edge down so it doesn't fray. 

Then you can go ahead and hang it up and be done if you like, and it should look like this one.

However, if you have some wider coordinating ribbon, you can glue your ribbon organizer on top of it to create a more substantial looking organizer. I did that with my black grosgrain ribbon, and I think it turned out really cute.  I have seen hangers like this decorated with flowers and bows on the top too, but since I made it for me, I thought I'd leave it streamlined and a little more adult looking.  All I did to glue the black and white ribbon to the organizer was fold the edge over and glue it.  Then I put a dot of glue between the organizer and the ribbon at each of the loops and glued it from the bottom to the top.  Then I folded the top of the wider ribbon over and glued it then glued the organizer right along the edge.  

It was a cheap, easy, and works perfectly to organize my headbands.  I have the black and white one hanging in my bathroom already.  They hang perfectly off of little command adhesive hooks, but would also work fine on a nail or larger coat rack hooks--they are very versatile.