Easy Bow Making

Just had to share this.
Let me start by saying that I am the mother of 3 little boys.  Three little boys that DON'T wear hair bows!  I still have a fascination with making them, though.  I guess it's a good thing I have 3 nieces.
When I first started making bows, I constantly struggled with making them even and perfect.  And also, I just couldn't find the best way to tie the center.  Lots of tutorials online show tying a knot in the center of the bow.  I was just terrible at this.  I always felt like I had two left hands.  I know the idiom is "two left feet", but seriously, I had two left hands.  Maybe a better one would be "all thumbs".  I just could not figure out how to hold the bow and tie a tight knot at the same time.
For Christmas this year, I made hair bows as gifts for all the girls in my boys' preschool class.  I had to crank out a lot of bows and didn't really have a ton of time to fuss.  So with the help of lots of tutorials, I came up with this variation which has been tremendously helpful in turning out lots of bows.

Here is my doohickey.  I made this from a scrap piece of heavy stabilizer I had left over from another project.  I cut it three inches wide on the top side for thicker ribbon.  The bottom side is 2 inches for smaller bows with thinner ribbon.  Many tutorials suggest using a tool like this made from cardboard, but this is definitely more pliable.  You will see an illustration of this at the end of the tutorial.  

As you can see from the picture above, I cut a small section out of the middle.   It should be centered so that your bows come out even on each side.

Take your ribbon and line it up with one side of your doohickey (sorry...not sure what else to call it :).  

  

Wrap it around once....and then again.

Trim the excess ribbon so that the other end of the ribbon is about even with the other edge of your doohickey.

Now you are ready for tying the center.  Instead of tying, I have found it sooo much easier to put a couple of stitches in the center and then tie off.



Make sure you have a pretty good knot at the end of your thread.  This will help when you pull to gather the center.  You will also need a little bit of excess thread past your knot.  You will use this to tie off in the end.

This is where you see how important that center cut is on your doohickey

Start at the bottom and stitch through all layers being careful not to catch the doohickey in your needle.  They don't need to be perfect or even close to perfect.  You'll notice I used red thread. Makes no difference, because when your bow is finished, you won't even see the thread.

Almost done.

When you have enough stitches to secure your center you will feed the needle through the bottom center to the front side.












Tug pretty good and you will start to see the beginning of a bow.  You can wrap your thread around 1 or more times.






Now is a good time to take your bow off.  Look how easy it is to bend your doohickey to take the ribbon off :)  Score!

Now tie your two ends.  It's so easy to keep the bow tight in the center because of all those stitches.

There you have it! A perfect, even bow...EVERY. SINGLE. TIME!
Now you can just trim your thread, heat seal your ribbon ends, and hot glue a piece of ribbon around the center to cover the thread.