DIY Gift Bow

As you can probably tell by now, I love taking an ordinary product and making it my own. If there is a way to personalize something, I am more than likely going to figure out how to do it and make it happen. And that desire is compounded ten fold when I realize that I can put my children’s touch on things. Take a gift bow, for instance. Just an ordinary bow, nothing special about it. You can buy them in a large bag for a couple of bucks at any big box store. But what if you could make your own? What if you could make one with your children’s beautiful scribbled artwork on it? You really just can’t get more personalized than that. So I’d like to show you how to make your own gift bows. You can do as I did and use children’s artwork, you could use a map of a special place, patterned scrapbook paper or even just remnants of leftover wrapping paper. The sky is the limit with these bows and they are relatively easy and quick to make so you can make a bunch! Let’s get started!

I used these adorable scribble pictures that my girls colored for me. I have used both scribbles and intricately detailed pictures (read: stick figures) and I personally prefer the scribbles because you just lose too much of the picture otherwise.

You’ll start by cutting your paper into strips. I used my paper trimmer for this, but scissors would work as well. We used a regular old piece of printer paper for our bows, so they are the standard 8 1/2″ x 11″ size. (Again, you can use any size. We have used 12″ x 12″ papers as well as scraps. They all look great.) Because I prefer bigger bows, I trimmed my paper to 8 strips of 1″ x 11.”

Next comes the slightly tricky part…folding the paper strips into figure eights. Don’t worry, I took a bunch of pictures of these steps to help you through. Fold one side down as shown and place a dab of hot glue to hold it. Next, do the same fold on the opposite side and add another dab of hot glue. Set that strip aside and repeat the first two steps on all 8 strips.

Here is a picture of all of my figure eights glued and ready to be assembled.

Once you have all of your strips folded and glued into figure eights you can start to make your bow. You’ll want to place a figure eight on the bottom, add a dab of hot glue and then arrange another figure eight on top basket weave style. Continue to add figure eights making sure to layer each piece in a different direction to give your bow a nice full look. By the time that you get to the 6th or 7th figure eight, your bow will become very full and you might decide to stop adding more. That’s totally fine, just go to where you like it and stop. The bows that are pictured only have seven layers and they are super full and fluffy.

So here they are…easy to make, totally personalized, adorable scribble bows made by my girls. They are so proud to attach these to gifts for their grandparents and their siblings and they light up when they see them under the tree. To attach to gifts, I use either a piece of double sided tape or another dab of hot glue and stick them right onto the wrapping paper. I just love them! What do you think?