How To: Reusable Bows

Hello, my name is Jamie and I am famous at my school for gigantic bows. I often get asked, hey where do you get those? My answer, oh I made it. Everyone seems to marvel at that. However, I never set foot near a sewing machine in the process. I don't even use thread or needle. How is this you may ask?! Well, I'll teach you right now. All you need is a hair tie (depending on the size of the bow you might need two) and a scarf of some kind. I'll be using a long red scarf. and a white hair tie so you can see the steps. It's recommended to use a black one or one that matches the color of the bow.

All you need! 

The first step, if you have a long scarf, is to lay it out flat and bring the two sides in to meet in the middle. In other words, you're folding the scarf into fourths. If your scarf is square shaped, you're going to fold the corners into the middle to make a smaller square. 

I put a paper under the red scarf because it was hard to tell I folded it

Now this is where you need to consider the floppy-ness and size of the bow. If you have a fairly big and this scarf, such as the red one (it's about three feet long and six inches wide) then you would fold the scarf in half width wise and then again bring the two sides in to the middle once more. This will make a small bow... well, when compared to big bows. For a square scarf, you'd fold the corners in again to make it smaller. 

More folds, woo hoo!

The third step is to scrunch! If you have a long scarf, you want to overlap the pieces in the middle to make it less floppy and more defined.  Then, use your hand to scrunch it in the middle. Without tying it, make some adjustments to get the right kind of shape. If you have a square scarf, it should be pretty tick by now. Choose which side you want to be the top and bottom and scrunch it with your hand. Make adjustments to get the desired shape. 

Scrunched! Make sure the two sides of the bow are proportional to each other

Now, take the hair tie and pull it to the center of the bow and tie it around a couple times. make sure it's tight and keeps the shape of the bow. Now, you can pull two sides of the hair tie that's around the bow apart from each other a bit to give the middle part of a bow. You can either do this or tie a completely different colored ribbon around it.

I guess I didn't take a picture of the green one like this...

Now you're done! Enjoy you bow and attach it anywhere you want, your shirt, skirt, bag, whatever, using pins and clips. I usually attach it to my hair using bobby pins and barrettes. Be careful of the weight of the bow, it'll probably be pretty heavy if it's anything like my green one. 

Desired look of the bow

Once you're done using it, just take the hair tie and pull it right out. Unravel the scarf and there you have it. You can use this over and over again to have both a scarf and a bow. :] 

Voila! Reusable. 

Thanks for reading! I wish you luck on your bow endeavors. 

Yours Truly, Jamie ♥