New Year's Eve DIY

We're packing our bags and making the trek up to the Smoky Mountains again for our annual New Year's gathering. Before we left, I was browsing on Pinterest for some cute decor ideas seeing as Target was fresh out of any and Party City is over 45 minutes away (maybe I'm just lazy). I found several different ideas, but my favorite were pipe cleaner crowns. I looked at several different ideas and finally came up with something I really liked (I think Lauren Conrad did something similar a few years back). It's really simple and you don't need very many things!

You'll need: 

Pipe cleaners in the color of your choice (I bought 3 packages of 25; 1 silver, 1 gold, and 1 white sparkle not shown all from Michaels $1.79 each)

Headbands ($0.88 for 2 at Walmart)

A pair of scissors

I made several different sizes to see which I liked better. I still haven't decided, but at least I have lots of options! 

For a larger crown, take one pipe cleaner, bend in half, and twist a loop once or twice or until you feel it will stay securely. Repeat 5 times.

 Once you have 5 pieces bent and looped, take two and connect them by twisting the loose ends. It all depends on how tall you want your crown as to where you should connect. I experimented heavily here, but as long as all 5 are connected at the same spot you'll be good to go.

 Once you have them all connected, they should look a bit like this.

Take about a half of a pipe cleaner and make it into a circle. This size also depends on how tall and wide you want your crown, but you can easily guess by placing your connected loops around the circle.

Once you have your circle and 5 connected pieces, place the circle on the bottom and bend the loose ends around the circle. You can either keep bending them around the circle to make a clean simple look, or cross the ends to add a bit extra.

To connect it to the headband simply cut 2 pieces about an inch or two of pipe cleaner and bend them in half.

 Loop the bent pieces over the crown bottom and around the headband to secure it.

 That's it! You have your headband and you're ready to party!

 You can also take the left over pieces of pipe cleaner to make more decorations for your New Year's look. Simply bend the pieces into the letters or numbers you want and leave a tail at the bottom so they can be attached to the crown base or directly onto you headband (that way you can change them out each year).

 (This silver crown below was made from half pipe cleaners and is smaller than the ones above)