Butterfly Headband with Italian Crepe Paper

Butterfly headband with italian crepe paper

I’ve been playing with pink and gold 180 gram Italian crepe paper from Carte Fini, and it’s a lot of fun to work with! This is not your typical paper, nor even your typical lightweight crepe paper. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful floral arrangements lately with this special kind of crepe paper (specifically projects from Lia Griffith and from The Lovely Ave), and I wanted to give it a try. This is a butterfly headband I made for my daughter.

Although I was not able to cut this design with my Silhouette machine, I did make a printable pattern to share. You can print it, then cut the pieces with scissors. Be sure to orient the cutouts with the grain of the crepe paper. (On the smallest pieces I made some lines to show where to line it up with the grain, and on the larger cutouts you can line up the words with the grain.)

Cut out the butterfly pieces (I used bubblegum pink for the small and large pieces, and metallic gold for the medium pieces), then gently pull and spread the outside edges in small segments to give them a frilly edge. Leave the narrow tips alone where you will be gluing them.

Once the pieces are cut out and outer edges “frilled”, you can use a hot glue gun to assemble the butterfly.  I used a scrap piece of crepe paper on the back to give it a small base to start.

Hot glue butterfly crepe paper layers - back

Hot glue butterfly crepe paper layers - front

Add the layers with more hot glue. I kept the inner tips mostly lined up and touching in the center. The very center will be covered up, so don’t worry too much about perfection.

Hot glue butterfly crepe paper layers - layered

For the center, I took a piece of metallic gold crepe paper that was about 1 3/8″ tall and about 6″ wide (grain oriented vertically). I just rolled it up and hot glued it to itself to hold the shape, then hot glued it to the center of the butterfly.

Italian Crepe Paper butterfly

Italian Crepe Paper butterfly - detail

Now it’s ready to attach to a headband. But not just any headband… A gold wrapped headband! I love the metallic crepe paper because it acts like a foil and wraps around objects to take their shape while still holding a lot of its original texture. I wrapped this headband in a few strips of gold metallic crepe paper (cut to about 3/4″ – 1″ tall and several inches long) that I stretched out first. I just used some hot glue to secure the beginning and end of each strip.

Wrap a headband with gold foil italian crepe paper

Headband wrapped with gold foil crepe paper

And here’s the final product on my lovely model. The butterfly is quite large, so you can scale down the pattern if you want. My daughter likes her hair things big and flashy, so it was great for her.

Italian Crepe Paper butterfly headband

 

A note for Silhouette users: Although I use my Silhouette Cameo for most of my paper crafts, this heavy Italian crepe paper proved to be too difficult to cut consistently. The texture prevents it from sticking to even a new, ultra-sticky mat. And this paper is surprisingly thick when cutting against the grain. The combination makes it difficult to cut with probably any electronic cutter.

However, I was able to cut some designs from this crepe paper with my Cameo. I’m still in the experimentation phase, but I’ll share the tricks I use in upcoming posts.

Supplies used:
Bubblegum 180 gram Italian crepe paper
Metallic gold 180 gram Italian crepe paper
Low-temp hot glue gun
Headband

My PDF pattern: Crepe Paper Butterfly (click to download)

 



2 thoughts on “Butterfly Headband with Italian Crepe Paper”

    • I still haven’t had enough time to try it again. It definitely wouldn’t cut on the paper as-is, but I had some success with stretching it before cutting. Now that the kids are back in school, that project is moving back towards the top of my list. There is also a deep-cut blade soon to be released from Silhouette, so that may help. Sorry it has taken so long!

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