Felt Bow Tutorial

Okay so here are a few links to how I came to make this.  It all started over at luvinthemommyhood last Friday for her weekend wishes where she posted a pic of the most adorable felt gift bow.  I knew I just had to make it.  Of course I thought to myself why reinvent the wheel when someone has already made these before.  Enter in bing a pretty awesome search engine if I do say so myself where I typed in something like 'felt bow tutorials' which is where I saw this post from How About Orange where she shows off another blogger who used her gift bow tutorial to make a felt one.  SCORE!  I knew I could figure it out.

However, I did not like how think the center of the bow was from all those layers of felt and I couldn't seem to get the loops to fold just to my liking (I'm rarely a perfectionist so when perfectionism rears its head I almost always listen...or walk away).  Since all the hard work was already done for me I simply needed to tweak it just a little to my personal liking.  Looking back at all those pictures makes me realize I still need to tweak it a little more, but this is what I made and for the most part I'm happy with it.  I hope you like it too.

 

What you'll need:

-Felt, pictured is 1/4 yard of felt however one 9x12 sheet of felt from a craft store will work.  Eventually I'd love to make this using 100% wool felt, but I didn't want to pay that much for this project currently.

-Glue Gun and extra glue sticks, mine is a hi-temp that I bought for $2.50 and it worked great, not sure about lo-temp guns...I prefer hi-temp simply because the glue dries slower so I can adjust better during the process.

-Self healing mat, rotary cutter, straight edge (of course you can cut everything out with scissors, a rotary cutter makes everything so much easier & faster).

Pieces You'll need:

5- .75" x 3.5"

6- .75" x 4.5"

1- 2.75" square

Step 1 Cut out pieces

 

 

Step 2  Cut square into a circle

 

Step 3 With 1 3.5 inch strip glue into a circle

 

Step 4  Twist remaining felt strip into this shape:

 

See where I've glued it on the back:

 

When you're all done this is what you should have:

 

Step 5  Taking a felt ribbon from the 4.5" length place three drops of glue on it like so:

 

Now adhere it to the felt circle like so:

 

Step 6  Take another felt ribbon from the longer length, glue it as before and place it on the felt circle opposite the first one.  Shown below:

 

Step 7  Repeat with the remaining 4 larger ribbons as shown.

 

Step 8 Taking the smaller remaining ribbons, and gluing as shown above, place on bow as shown:

 

Step 9 Glue the last loop in the center to complete the bow.

 

All Done!  See it's pretty simple.  Also save any extra felt strips so you can make another one, perhaps multicolored?  You could always add a pin to the back or glue it onto a headband or turn it into a hair clip.  One is only limited by their own expectations.  

So get crafting!