DIY Floral Wire Minnie Ears

Before we go on a trip to Disney, we LOVE the planning process.  I know, we are crazy like that!  😉  We think it helps to build excitement for the trip and makes the vacation feel longer than it is.  For each trip we like to do something fun ahead of time whether it is making customized t-shirts, magnets for our Disney cruises, Disneybounding (or just color coordinating our outfits) or customizing our Magic Bands.  This year I saw a set of Minnie ears on Etsy that were sooooo cute!  I loved them so much that I decided to try to make some instead of spending the high amount of money they were asking for them.  I think they turned out stellar and I am going to show you how to make your own DIY Floral Wire Minnie Ears!

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For this project you will need:

• Faux Flowers (1-2 stems per headband). We used Pink Plumera, Lavender & Yellow Plumera, Blue Hydrangea
• 12 gauge wire
• Headband
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• White Satin Ribbon
• Pearl Accents (optional)
• Tape Measure/Ruler
• Scissors
• Wire Cutters

We are making the trip this year with my in-laws and some friends of ours.  We have 4 boys and our friends have 3 boys so there are only 3 ladies going on this trip.  🙂  My mother in law just happened to be in town over the 4th so we decided to try our hand at making the ears then.  I was glad to have the extra help as there were some parts that an extra pair of hands came in handy!  We made two out of the three sets of ears that weekend.  We figured we can make all 3 pairs different and just swap them out so we can all get a day wearing each one.

My MIL and I went to Hobby Lobby to see what we could find in the line of flowers and wire.  We found some great tropical looking flowers there and the blue hydrangeas, which will end up going in the 3rd set to be made at a later date.  We had previously checked the floral section at Walmart too just to see what they had and I ended up liking a hydrangea stem from there a lot.  It had several shades of purple and that is my favorite color!  So we ran back to Walmart and got one of those.  

We did not end up finding the 12 gauge wire at Hobby Lobby but luckily they had it at a local hobby store.  I could have ordered it off of Amazon too but didn’t want to wait for it!  We found the white headbands in the bridal section at Hobby Lobby, they are super comfortable.  They do not dig into your head behind your ears at all!

The first step was to shape our Minnie ears.  I had watched a YouTube video on how to make these but did not like how she twisted the wire around the headband to attach it.  My MIL and I figured that the wire would be digging into our heads all day, even if it was covered by felt.  So we decided to form some ears and glue them to the top of the headband.

We needed something round to form the ears around that was the right diameter for the ears as well.  After some quick searching I found an old pickle jar.  I like to save my jars for craft projects like this DIY rope lantern.  😉  This jar looked like it would be the perfect size!  We had a set of Minnie ears from a previous trip that we used as a template of sorts to form our wire.  We formed one ear by wrapping it around the pickle jar and wiggling it back and forth to smooth it out.  Then we measured the wire against the Minnie ears to figure out where to start the next ear.  We cut the wire with the wire cutters a little long to begin with just to make sure we had enough length of wire to attach to the headband.

After we got the first set looking pretty good, we started on the 2nd set.  We tried to match it to the first one but things were not lining up very easily!  My MIL had a great idea to make marks on the jar on where we should do our bending of the wire and how much space goes between the ears.  Duh!  Why didn’t we think of that sooner?  Glad I had her around!  🙂  I would suggest to you to do this beforehand to save yourself some time and frustration!  Our measurements were 1½ inches between the two ends of the ears while it is wrapped around the pickle jar and 2⅞ inches across the top of the headband.

We ended up forming the 3rd set of ears from the wire since we were getting good at it now.  We were able to make all 3 sets of ears out of the package of 10 ft of wire.  After we got the wire ears formed, we had to figure out how to attach them to the headband.  We did not think hot glue alone would hold them so we got some white ribbon to wind around the points of attachment to help secure the wire.  Plus it also disguises the wire.  

Make sure to use plenty of hot glue when gluing the ears down.  

For the wrapping of the ribbon, we started on the edge of the headband below the start of the wire.  Using a lot of glue we glued and wrapped as tightly as we could.  We glued every inch of ribbon as we went along.  

After we were done the wire ears were pretty well secured.  I don’t think these babies will be coming off anytime soon!  🙂

Starting with the purple hydrangeas, we snipped them all off the stem using the wire cutters, leaving about an inch to glue down.  We got quite a few individual flowers from the one stem.  Plenty enough to make one set of ears.

Start gluing your flowers on right below one of the ears.  Make sure you do both sides as they will be seen coming and going.

After finishing our 2nd set, we decided we went a little crazy with the flowers on the first set.  The flowers went down too low on the sides on the purple set.  They almost reminded me of sideburns!  Ha!

So I went back and pulled some of them off and “cleaned up” the sides.  Much better!

We had fun with a little “modeling session”, I was unlucky lucky enough to be the model!  I am not too comfortable in front of the camera sometimes but I made the best of it.  Thank goodness I have a good photographer!  🙂

 

Here is a picture of the ears from the back, just as cute as the front!

For the 2nd set of ears, we used the pink and purple/yellow plumeria flowers.  These did not come with as many individual flowers on one stem so we used 2 stems for this set of ears.  That worked out great though so we could have the two different colors on there.  Again we started gluing the flowers on right below an ear.  We alternated the colors across the top and repeated it on the other side.  For the middle, we snipped the flowers down as low as they could go and glued them to the center of the headband.

We decided to add some leaves to this set of ears which I love!  We picked the smallest leaves that came on the flower stems and cut them down and glued them into the flowers.  Also we added a couple of the buds in there too!

We had bought some little pearl accents to add but I decided that I liked them just the way they are.  I don’t think they need anything else.  What do you think?

I can’t wait to wear these on our trip!  They will be so fun and cute in our pictures.  

Do you have any fun things you do to build anticipation for your Disney trip? I would love to hear from you!