How to Make Large Present Bows

In my opinion, present bows are NOT BIG ENOUGH.  For a birthday present today, I made the biggest bow that I could - no neatly placed bows in the corner for me, I cover the whole thing.

These are much, much easier than I thought to make and you can change the number of layers needed by varying the lengths and width, each time creating a different effect and style, so you can either be uniform, or just make it up as you go along [like me].

Shall we start?
As you know, I love my brown paper wrapping, so I'm going all out with a neon patterned tissue paper design, but you can use almost anything to create these.

Start with the longest strips of tissue paper.  I wanted my bow to fill the top of the present, so used this as my guide - the length of my strips were double the length of the present.  I also wanted a fairly structured bow [as structured as tissue paper can be!], so kept my strips fairly wide, around 3 cm.

With each strip, pattern side down, create a figure eight, looping each end and join in the middle with a staple/cellotape/glue:

 

To create the base of the bow, place each looped strip on top of each other until they interlock, fixing each in place [the wider your strips, the fewer you will need]:

For the next layer, I cut my strip slightly shorter, creating loops with each again and checking how they sat in the bow before placing on top the the base and fixing in place:

Continue this pattern, adding shorter looped strips until the bow has formed as you like - this can be as full or flat as your prefer:

To finish the bow, take one short strip, creating one loop and fixing the join to the middle of the bow:

Your bow is finished - you can fix in place as it is, or add curled ribbons, create bow trims for a rosette effect or create a few bows to group together:

And if for you, like me, Christmas is the best excuse to get a theme of wrapping paper and trimmings, co-ordinated in colour and patterns, you can make these out of spare cuts of wrapping paper, plain or decorative paper and also fabric and ribbon scraps.  Endless.  I'm also contemplating making even larger ones as decorations:  I'll let you know how I get on with those.

P.S - Traditional ribbon bows are easy peasy too - create a decorative bow with this technique, posted here.

I hope you've had a great weekend
[As a side note, I'm also sad to say that I think we have reached the time of year where all my photos will have a slightly grey-it's-raining-outside hue to them].

see you next time x