Thursday, November 14, 2013

How to make 2 perfect princess bows



When I started this blog, I never imagined that one day I would be posting about how to make a Disney princess bow.  Gulp! I'm just not a girly girl and that whole pink, glittery princess thing just sort of passed me by.  And then suddenly my baby girl turned into a girly girl and well, some days Disney princesses are all we talk about...

M's school are having a 'magic themed' dress up day. They can go as any character in a story with a magical theme.  After a brief flirtation with Snow White, M settled on 'Belle' from Beauty and the Beast.


I know my daughter well enough not to try to attempt to make her a dress, but a Belle-style hair bow was acceptable.

Here's how I made it -

I found some lovely 7cm wide satin ribbon at my local craft factory outlet shop.  I'm guessing by the way it burns that it's either nylon or polyester.  I've no idea how much it should retail at, but I got about 3 metres for 80 pence.  A quick look online tells me that I got a really good deal!
  
I did briefly try to improvise a bow maker, but as the bow is going to be pretty big and the ribbon is so wide, it was much simpler to just knot it by hand.  The wide ribbon is also very forgiving.


Take about 90cm of ribbon.  Form the 2 loops by bringing the ends of the ribbon together and pinching a central section with your left and right hands. You want the central folded section to be about 25% wider than your final bow.


Simply bring right over left and knot.


Adjust the ribbon ends so that they sit behind the loops and to the bottom.  When you've got the ends where you want them you can start tightening the knot.  It might take a bit of playing and fiddling to get both loops to the right size.  This works much better with wider ribbon, and as the bow is quite oversized, there is a lot of room for adjustment.


Cut the ribbon ends at a 45 degree angle.


To prevent the ribbon ends from fraying, singe them with a lighter or candle until the ends of the fibres have just melted together.


Two lovely neat ribbon ends that won't fray.


With a needle a thread, stitch the knot in all the places that the ribbon sections meet to prevent it from unravelling.


I sewed a small clip to the back so that I could attach it to a hair tie.


Here's the final bow.  I think this would also work beautifully on a Christmas wreath or on the back of a chair...

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I'd said that M had flirted with the idea of being Snow White, well this was the first bow that I made -


I made it in the same way as the Belle bow, but the loops are quite a lot smaller and I pulled the 'tails' to the back rather than downwards.  I cut the tails to the same length as the loops and then singed the ends again to stop them from fraying.


I wanted to put the bow on a headband so that M could just put the bow on and off whenever she was playing at dressing up.  I took a brown satin ribbon headband and covered it in red 8mm ribbon.  I just glued it at the ends with E6000 adhesive , secured it with a peg and started wrapping the ribbon around at a 45 degree angle.


When I reached the end I added more glue, wrapped the ribbon around and secured it with pegs.  After a couple of hours, when the glue was pretty dry, I snipped the ribbon to about 4cm past the end of the headband, wrapped it and then stitched it over the ends of the headband. 


Admittedly I didn't do the neatest of stitching jobs in sewing the ends but hey, she's 5!  Then I just stitched the bow onto the headband.  Here it was very useful that the band was covered in ribbon as I was able to stitch into the ribbon and through the tail and then inside of the loops so you can only see the stitching if you look inside the loops.


One finished Snow White bow that's perfect for playing dress up, and it cost me less than £1 to make.  That's my kind of crafting!



Related post
World Book Day Dress up -
Lulu and the Best Cake Ever!
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1 comment:

Izzy said...

Lovely thanks