Be My Valentine?

As usual, the Purl Bee serves as my inspiration. Last week I saw their post with directions for making Valentine's Day hair clips. I was excited to make some, and other than a quick stop at CVS for little hairclips, I have all the materials in my craft stash. I had the perfect opportunity to try this pattern out the other day.

I made the mistake once of not being accessible to my 3-year-old when she woke up scared one night. A mistake I have sworn to her that I won't repeat. When my husband is away or working late I don't like to work in my basement studio while the girls sleep upstairs. Even with the monitor on, I feel like I'm too far away. So, when my husband was away on business a lot in the last few weeks this project was a perfect one to work on while sitting quietly on the couch with some mindless TV on in the background.

I am a bit obsessed with these, if you couldn't tell. I have to say, I think mine are cuter than the all-pink ones on Purl's site. I like more colorful things, in general, in case you haven't noticed yet.

Follow all the directions as posted here. I suggest these minor changes:
1. The tiny hair clips they used could only be found near me with plastic on the top in different colors. That plastic made the clips hard to close when the felt was sewn on. I ripped the plastic off once noticing that, and the clips are a lot better. This would be true of larger clips, too.
2. In general, I think the tiny clips are a bit hard to get into the hair of very small kids without holding their head still and pressing hard. I suggest enlarging the pattern a bit to fit a slightly bigger clip, not grown-up sized, but average kids sized. You can see the two final sizes I made here, the smaller is the actual pattern from Purl, the larger is my own:

3. I think the clips are cuter when the back layer has pinked edges. I suggest making them all that way. In fact, I liked that look so much that I finally splurged and treated myself to a new pinking shears. The one I had was probably about 40 years old, not so sharp, and hard to use. My new Fiskars one is AMAZING! And, I happened to go to Joann's on a day that all sewing scissors were 40% off. I could not believe my luck--clearly the craft gods were smiling on me. And clearly they want me to make more felt projects with pinked edges.

This is the pile of little ones so far. (The photo at the top is the pile of bigger ones.)

Feel free to get creative with the shape of the felt and the placement of the embellishments. I love the ones with the off-set tiny hearts, and my daughter seems to prefer the rectangular clips. Thanks, Purl, for another great idea.