If you’ve ever used a cord in your life, you know they’re prone to tangles. Headphones — especially earbuds — are some of the worst. Clever DIYer Ada posted a crafty solution: wrap your headphone cables like they’re a friendship bracelet and they’ll become tangle-free.
If you know how to make the square/Chinese staircase knots required to make a friendship bracelet, you already have the requisite skills for pulling off this tangle-prevention headphone hack. If not, read this. You’re essentially making a friendship bracelet around your headphone cables. While Ada used embroidery floss (which you can pick up at almost any craft store) to get the job done, you should be able to get by with a thin string. Embroidery floss, however, will provide you with a softer finish and a much wider choice of colours.
Ada’s headphones took about a day to wrap in embroidery floss, so if that’s more time than you want to spend avoiding tangles you should learn a handy wrapping method, make a cord wrapper or buy an AppleCore.
I wrapped my headphones [Pinterist via Unplggd]
Eccentric
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:30 AMErr, correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t this shorten the cable somewhat? I looked at the friendship bracelet howto and from what I can see you would shorten it by quite a bit!
blu-k
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:49 AMHow would it make them shorter? You’re just surrounding them with thread surely?
Deb
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 11:25 AMUm the link to the friendship bracelet shows a completely different type of bracelet than the one that would have been used to make the cords (the one in the link is kind of useless for wrapping around cords)
jubal1
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 1:28 PMWhy would anyone waste so much effort on a pair of those crappy apple headphones in the picture, surely the worst headphones in the world?
If you are sitting on a bus or a train and you can hear the annoying tinny sound of someone’s shit music, 9/10 its someone wearing those shitty, shitty $1 headphones that apple put in with ‘i’ devices.
Deb
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 2:40 PMWow… been sipping on the haterade lately? settle down, it works for any plastic-like headphones. And half the time people don’t have good enough hearing to notice the difference between ‘cheap’ headphones or expensive ones, or they just can’t justify the cost. Chilllllllll
Dan
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 3:14 PMI’ll just stick to my tangle free Jays.
smurfydog
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 9:55 PMThanks for the post. This will be a fun project for my 10yo god-daughter as she loves making things and also has no end of trouble with her earbuds getting tangled.
I looked at the how-to link and was a bit confused at first but I think I’ve got it now – anyway she already knows how to make a friendship bracelet so I’m sure she’ll work it out.
Cheap way to keep her occupied for a few hours either way.
Wish us luck!
Brianna
Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 2:21 AMI also wrapped my head phones after seeing this! I used a different wrapping knot method. for more types of knots go to
http://forwardknot.com/tutorial.php?id=5 and the one i used was hitches it was easy and only took about 3 hours cumulatively, what they don’t tell you is how long to cut your two different pieces of Embroidery floss, i tripled them from the length of my headphones!
Lindsey Graves
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:30 AMAre you ever going to sell these? I would so buy them!