The credit for the blog post goes 100% to my sister, Sydney Christensen. She is a DIY extraordinaire!  I couldn't think of anything to post for this month so she came to my rescue - and it was perfectly timed for Halloween as well. So, here is her amazing advice on how to make the best getup for your little girl for the holiday...

"Halloween is right around the corner, and I’ve got a fantastic, low cost solution to that question in the back of your mind: ‘What is my little girl going to dress up like for Halloween?’

Ready for this? Remember that cute Disney movie Tangled that every girl fell in love with a few years back. Well if you’re like me, chances are you’ve somehow acquired a Rapunzel dress for your daughter around the same time that she would request to watch it repetitiously, day after day for months. And if you don’t have one, I’ll almost guarantee your neighbor down the road does, and would be willing to let you borrow it. Those fantastic costume companies make their costumes one size fits all, so you should be good to go in the costume department.

But a purple and pink dress does not a Rapunzel make. Her beautiful tresses are all but impossible to duplicate… until now! And it gets even better! You can create your own Rapunzel hair for… wait for it… FIVE DOLLARS.

WHAAAAAAAAT?

That’s right! Just $5 and a nearby Dollar Tree, and you will be set to have the happiest and cutest princess as your companion Halloween night.

Before I get started with the instructions, I have a little disclaimer. We will be working with a LOT of hair. It’s not human hair either, so you can’t just brush out the tangles. Therefore, if you are the type of person who can’t handle touching messy, Tangled (yes I totally intended that pun) hair, just close this blog and walk away.

If you’re a brave soul still reading this, let’s get started! You will need:

• ·         4 blonde fake hair pieces from the Dollar Tree - $4 (I’m not sure if these are stocked on a year-round basis. I checked multiple stores earlier this year for a different project (Princess Leia hair). None of them had any in stock and the managers weren’t sure if they would be brought back. Imagine my excitement when I found them again last week!)
• ·         A bunch of dollar store flowers - $1
• ·         Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• ·         Scissors
• ·         Mini hair bands – ideally transparent or blonde to be inconspicuous in the hair
• ·         *optional – heat knife
• ·         *optional – ball approximately the size of your child’s head

Literally the hardest part of this whole project is separating three out of the four hair pieces from their headbands. I’m not sure what kind of adhesive is holding that hair on, but that stuff is stronger than Super Glue and Gorilla Glue mixed together. Who’d have expected such strong adhesive from a dollar store product? Not me! This is where the heat knife comes into play. My method was to slide that blade between the hair and the headband, trying to melt the headband and adhesive away from the hair. If you try this, be so careful to keep the loose hair strands away from the heat because they are just plastic and will melt right off. Sorry for no picture of this process, I wasn’t brave or talented enough to take a picture while trying to hold the heat knife. Perhaps the tip of the hot glue gun will work to melt the headband too, but I didn’t try it, so good luck!

 This is the hair after I melted the headband away from it

Luckily once you get some of the hair separated from the headband, it’s easy to pull the rest off.

The next step is to clean up the ends by cutting off the ribbon binding and then gluing the ends so that they don’t come apart.

Repeat this process with two more hair pieces. Make sure to leave the remaining one attached to its headband. This is what things should look like so far:

Now if you’ve got a beach ball, it will be helpful for the remaining steps. If you look at this next picture, I’ve positioned the headband on the ball, but I didn’t to a very good job. The headband is resting right where my daughter’s ears would be if this were really her head (I didn’t think that through). So you’ll want to make sure yours is a little farther back if possible. Mine still turned out alright, but it created a slight bagginess to the sides of the finished product.

These hair pieces don’t have much hair all by themselves. In order to make it so your Rapunzel doesn’t look like she’s balding, we need to double up some of the hair. So take one piece of hair that you’ve separated from the headband, and we’re going to glue it to the top of the one still connected to the headband.

Purely for aesthetic purposes I overlapped ends of the second hair piece with some strands of the first so that the cut off braid doesn’t look tacky. But the best part of this project is that you will place flowers all over it at the end, so if there is any spot that looks less than lovely, problem solved!

Next we are going to braid the hair that will extend behind the ears. Grab a decent amount like so:

And braid loosely, tying off after about 5 inches with a hair band.

This next step is a skill that I’ve seen in many hairstyles making their way around the internet. You need to tug some of the strands out of each layer of the braid, starting at the top. This will make the braid look fuller and give the impression that there is more hair than there actually is. You will need this skill for the large braid down the back, so if my explanation has you confused, I’ve found this short YouTube video by Hannah Shanae that will hopefully help out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76oxub5MlfQ Start watching at 1:55.

Here is the first tug.

And this is what it should look like when you’ve loosened everything.

Repeat to the other side.

It is important to glue the hair in place once you get it the way you like it. Throughout this whole project I glued the underside of the braids in the creases to make sure the hair doesn’t get ruined if it gets tugged on.

Next we’re going to use the curvature of the ball to set the top of the hair to sit nicely over the back of the head. If you don’t have a ball, you can probably use your daughter’s head, but don’t get her hair caught with Rapunzel’s. Leaving out the braids and about 1.5-2 inches of hair above them, pull the top hair to the back, finger combing tangles out, and tie with a hair band.

Now we’re going to add the other two pieces of hair.

I didn’t add them directly to the banded hair in the back. Instead I banded and glued them to the remaining loose hair strands of hair. I suggest you just glue the hair and skip the hair band step. It was way too much work to maneuver that much hair through the hair band, and wasn’t worth it. Gluing the additional hair just a few inches away from the middle-back hair band will allow the large braid to start out wide, giving it a fuller appearance.

I brought the loose side hair under the braid and banded the additional bunch of hair to it. I then glued around the band, which, silly me, melted the hair band and snapped it. But the glue held, so no harm done. I do suggest hiding the glued portion underneath the behind-the-ear braid and gluing it in place.

Now we need to separate three groups of hair in order to begin our main braid. This next picture is complicated so I will break it down for you. The middle group of hair, which I have banded together to keep it contained, includes the main first band of hair, as well as small amounts of hair from the side additions (see the portions of hair I am holding in the previous picture). It is crucial to add the amounts from the side for two reasons. First, the additional hair is heavy, so if it’s not secured in multiple areas, it will come unglued. Second, the added hair is now longer than the middle hair bunch, so you will need to include the longer strands in the middle bunch in order for it to reach to the bottom. (I still found that this bunch was shorter than the others, so I had to inconspicuously borrow longer strands from the other bunches periodically through the braiding process).

The two side bunches include the remainder of the hair you just added, as well as the loose braids from behind the ears, which you will cross over and include in the bunch on the opposite side from where it started.

We can finally get to braiding the long hair down Rapunzel’s back! I braided a few inches down, temporarily banded the braid, and went back to loosen up the hair strands and glue them together before continuing. REMEMBER to glue the underside to hold the strands in the place you want them.

In this next picture you can see the top length of hair (on the right) has been loosened and looks thicker. I’ve braided a few more inches down and am about to loosen those bunches. You will start to have the shorter lengths of hair ending now, so once you get the hair loosened the way you like it, you can glue the ends that stick out to the underside of the braid.

Another thing you will run into is the ending of the smaller braids in the bunches containing the additional hair pieces. I wanted the braid look to continue, so I braided a small amount of hair right at the end of the other. Don’t use too much hair in the small braids, since the hair going into the large main braid is thinning out rapidly.

At this point towards the bottom, the loosening of the main braid is key in keeping the full appearance that is prevalent at the top.

Once you have braided to within a few inches of the end, band the hair tightly. This is the part where we get to cover up any weird looking places with beautiful flowers so no one knows what mix-ups lie beneath.

The best and last step is to reveal the finished beautiful hair to your daughter and commit her delighted reaction to memory before allowing her to rush of into her bedroom to change into her Rapunzel dress and then beg you to let her wear the hair (which it is heavy enough that I would definitely suggest pinning it in so that it doesn’t keep slipping off her head).

And of course I have to include pictures of my own daughter walking around like she is the real Rapunzel (even note the bare-feet!)."