How To Make A Flower Embroidered Scrunchie [Easy DIY]

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to make a beautiful embroidered scrunchie. Scrunchies are relatively quick and easy to sew. I think they look great with patterned or solid fabric, and stitching your own custom embroidery to them adds a special handmade touch.

These would be great to give as a gift or to use for yourself!

I will be going over some tips for designing and planning out the stitches you want to use as well as an easy way to sew them once you’re done stitching.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase an item.

Supplies

• fabric
• embroidery floss, crewel yarn, beads – make sure whatever you use is colorfast like DMC thread
• 5 inch embroidery hoop
• embroidery needle
• sewing machine
• embroidery scissors
• safety pin or a dowel
• tracing paper or tear away stabilizer
• 8 inches of braided elastic – purchase on Amazon
• a pencil or water soluble marker – purchase on Amazon

Choosing The Fabric

Scrunchies look great with a variety of different fabrics, but there are some that are harder to embroider on.

If you plan to add embroidery to your scrunchie, you’ll want to pick a natural, evenly woven fabric, such as linen or cotton. I used gold Kona cotton for mine.

Embroidered Scrunchie Tutorial

Cut out a long rectangle of fabric. I cut out 20 x 6 inches for mine, but you can play around with different sizes depending on how large or small you want to make your hair tie. This video shares a few different measurements that work well for scrunchies and it also shows you an interesting method for assembling it!

Making the Design

Scrunchies are fun to embroider and I feel like there’s a bit less pressure to create the perfect design since the fabric will be scrunched up.

Have fun with it and create a design that is evenly spaced throughout the fabric.

Cut out a piece of tracing paper or stabilizer that is the same size as the fabric and use a pencil to sketch out your idea.

You can create a repeating pattern or fill in randomly with some doodles like I did. (P.S. I think forget me not flowers would also look really cute with this!)

Once you’re happy with your sketch, trace over the design with a sharpie so it will be easier to transfer to the fabric.

Some Tips

• Make sure to fill in the design all the way to the edge so that there isn’t any blank space between the seam line once you sew everything together. It’s ok if your stitches don’t go to the very edge, but you want the design to look somewhat continuous.
• Try to keep the design evenly spaced out and relatively simple: this design I made took quite awhile: about 8 hours of stitching. eek!
• If you want to do something similar but you don’t want to spend hours and hours embroidering, you could outline the flowers instead of filling them in to speed things up!

Pin your design to the back of the fabric and then use a lightbox, tablet, or sunny window to transfer your design using a heat or water erasable pen or pencil.

Embroidering The Fabric

Place the fabric in an embroidery hoop and get to stitching!

For the leaves, I used the fishbone stitch. I outlined the stems with a back stitch. And the flower petals used the long and short stitch.

Since some of the design may be on the very edge of the fabric, you may find it a bit challenging to embroider everything with the hoop. You can take the fabric out of the hoop for areas that are hard to reach or you can try to place most of the fabric in the hoop and leave a little bit of fabric free around the edge you need to stitch. That way you’ll still have the fabric mostly stabilized while you’re stitching. It’s a bit challenging, but just do your best!

Once the flowers were filled in, I added a few seed beads in the center. For the flowers that were close to the edge, I left the beads out in case they got in the way while I was sewing everything together.

Once you’ve finished stitching, double check that all of your stitches are knotted off.

Assembling the Scrunchie

Iron or wash off any marks on the fabric.

Then, you’re ready to start assembling the scrunchie.

Fold the fabric in half lengthwise with the back of the stitches exposed.

Sew along the long edge with your sewing machine. Make sure to leave the sides open.

I used a darker color of thread, but it will look nicer if you use a color that matches the fabric.

Turn the fabric right side out.

Take your dowel or safety pin and thread the elastic through the tube of fabric.

Pin the fabric onto the elastic so that it doesn’t accidentally slip through.

Then, using tape or glue, secure the two ends of the elastic together. Use your sewing machine to sew across the elastic and secure the two ends together.

Tuck the fabric in on one side. Then place the other end inside of the tucked end of fabric.

Ensure that the seams line up nicely. Then you can sew the two ends together with you’re sewing machine. Now you’ve got a beautiful embroidered scrunchie!

If you liked this tutorial, check out these posts for even more embroidered accessories:

Embroidered brooch

Embroidered jean pocket

Amanda

Amanda is a hand embroidery teacher and artist. With over 15 years of experience in the craft industry and embroidery, she owns and runs Crewel Ghoul, sharing accessible tutorials and patterns to help inspire fellow crafters to get creative. In addition to running this website, she teaches on Skillshare and Youtube.