2 Easy Hair Ties to Make from Ribbon

My daughter Cristina is playing Lacrosse this year, and I’m this season’s team mom. Wanting to be the best team mom I can be, I have been working on little inexpensive gifts for the girls to include in their snack bags before games. We may not be able to have an end of year banquet, so I thought including little gifts along the season was a good way to show the girls some love.

I don’t want to spend a fortune, of course, so I’m trying to make sure that each project costs less than $1 a piece. This lacrosse team gift cost much less than that! The ribbon was only $6 and the hair ties were $1 for all of them. So the total cost was $7 and it made hair ties for 26 girls. That’s about 25 cents per hair tie!

For these two projects, you don’t need a sewing machine at all. I don’t even have folded edges in these hair ties. If you are looking for an easy sewing project, please feel free to view my post on DIY scrunchies.

This project just involves elastic hair ties and themed ribbon. Most of the girls on the team have long hair and so I was hoping these cute hair ties would serve as great gifts and also secure their braided pony tails that they usually wear coming out of their helmets. Why use regular old ponytail holders when you can enjoy a themed hair accessory?

Here’s the Lacrosse Ribbon that I used. (As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases) so if you buy the ribbon through the affiliate links, I may earn a small commission but it doesn’t affect your price in any way.

And here are some other Sports Themed Ribbons.

Volleyball Ribbon

Girl’s Golf Ribbon

Cheer Ribbon

Soccer Ribbon

Baseball/Softball Ribbon

Tennis Themed Ribbon

If you don’t see a themed ribbon that you like above, you can also head to the dollar store (or your favorite craft store) and pick up inexpensive ribbon there. They probably won’t have a specific sports theme, but you can just use a color combination that works with your team. They have lots of fun colors to choose from. While you’re there, you can also pick up the hair elastic. They usually sell a big pack of them and so that also keeps your cost down.

Easy Sports Hair Tie (Simple Tie Method)

Step by Step Tutorial

I cut the ribbon with my rotary cutter (scissors work just fine too of course) to show the two lacrosse sticks. That was a length of 6.5″. If I could go back, I would have actually cut a longer length. I would cut 3 lacrosse sticks so that the center one would take up the space of the “knot” and the two outer sticks would show a little more clearly.

So, you might want to consider a length of 9″ or 10″ for your ribbon hair ties. (Play with your ribbon pattern so that you can determine the right size for you.)

• Place the ribbon through the elastic hair band as shown below:

• Tie a simple knot in the ribbon around the elastic. Note in the photo below that this will end up with you having one side of the ribbon “upside down”. You want to avoid having this wrong side up.

• While making the knot, twist the ribbon so that both tails show the sports print.

• Pull tight. You need to pull it and then pull each tail for the sides of the bow to make sure that the knot is as small and tight as possible. From here, you can choose to create a finishing cut at the ends of the tails. I didn’t cut the ends of mine because it was already short and I didn’t want to risk cutting the printed lacrosse sticks at the bottom edges.

Easy Hair Bow Made from Ribbon (Loop Method)

Step by Step Instructions

I was concerned that the “knot” was taking up too much space in my ribbon hair ties, so I wanted to try a different method and see if I could get the lacrosse sticks to show a bit more. Here are the steps in that method:

• Lay the ribbon over the elastic band

• Pinch the ribbon so that you can see and access the elastic band easier

• Take the lower part of the elastic ribbon and tuck it up through the upper part, as shown below

• Pull tight

• Press down the knot in the elastic band and adjust the ribbon so that your tails look the way you want them to. You can see that the tails did indeed look longer in this method.

I hope you enjoyed learning about these easy hair ties to make from ribbon.

How to Stop Ribbon Fraying

You can see in my lacrosse hair ties above that the ribbon is starting to fray at the ends of your hair ties. There are a couple of ways to fix the raw edge. They both make use of heat applied to the ends of the ribbon.

One is to use a wood burning tool to run along the edges. Another way is to run the ribbon edge over a candle without touching the ribbon to it so that it doesn’t burn. You just want heat to seal up the edge a bit.

Lacrosse hair ribbon

Here’s how it turned out!

I hope you enjoyed these hair bands. These diy hair ties make easy hair accessories at an extremely reasonable price. They are a great project for team moms or even young girls looking to complete their own diy tutorials and create a great gift.

More Sports Themed Gifts

If you’re interested in making a quick hair scrunchie to go with a sports or school theme, I have a tutorial for that here:

Or, if you’d like to make a sports themed wreath with ribbon for your door, here’s a link to that project:

If you’d like to view other home made projects, please click on the “home made” menu tab above. If you would like to see other types of projects, such as home decor, home flips or renovations, check out the other tabs above.

And, if you would like to access the resource library for free templates and downloadable items, head over to my library page. There you’ll sign up and get the password. You’ll be added to my monthly newsletter with tutorials and home renovation ideas and projects.

Also check out my Personalized Face Masks (approx $1 each) that I made as a team gift for the girls. Another team gift was Headbands that also cost only around $1 each (the best thing for unruly hair)! They’re great team mom gifts.

Happy crafting!