Making Elaborate Glitter Hair Bows with the Cricut Maker

 

Hair bows are back again! But they’re so much more spangly than I remember them!

And they’re so easy to make in the Cricut Maker – though I did have a terrible time to begin with! I think it’s easy to get reliant on the settings the Cricut Maker provides you with…but there are a number of factors involved in getting a good cut. When I started to cut faux leather in anything more intricate than a circle (or even just a circle), I used all of the leather-type settings – but no matter what I did, the ‘jerkiness’ of the path taken by the blade just ate everything up. It was so disappointing!

There are so many things to bear in mind with this machine though – stickiness of the mat, the setting, the blade…but in this case, it was the shape that was the issue. Pressure was necessary, but both the deep blade and the fine blade dragged the material around the mat.

Then it occurred to me – the rotary blade! The bows have quite elaborate shapes, and I’ve seen what a magnificent job the Maker’s rotary blade does carving elaborate patterns on fabric…so I gave it a shot!

THIS WAS A BREAKTHROUGH! You don’t need a Sizzix Big Shot after all if you’ve got a maker – this is your answer!

 

(Need cards to display your bows on? Look no further than our free bow and headband display card cut files!)

You will need:

Sheet of glitter or faux leather: For one of the large bows, you’ll need two sheets of A4, but the others take far less. You can, of course, resize the SVG so that it’s the right size for you.

Glue (I used a glue gun)

Alligator clip

Preparing the pattern:

This one is super-easy as there are no score lines, everything should just be cut, as the file and the machine doing all the work…but, if you want to make this bow at full size and are using A4 sheets (and to my knowledge, most bow-type glitter is made in A4 size – that’s 290mm by 297mm for our international friends!), then you WILL need to alter the position of the pieces – the largest will need to be positioned diagonally. This layout worked well for me (this isn’t all of the pieces):

Since so many of the pieces are so small, I just fitted as many pieces as I possibly could on each sheet of A4. I ended up with this from about 14 sheets of A4!

Assembling the bows:

The process for assembling each of the bows is the same, but I’ll demonstrate with the large bow:

There are three pieces here – the largest dark purple piece is the base (i.e. the ‘tails’) of the bow. The pale blue piece will form the larger bow, and the white will be the smaller bow on top. The small purple piece is the band that will wrap around all three. So let’s start!

1. Turn the larger bow piece (which, in our case, is the pale blue piece – though it’s doing a rather good impression of lilac in these photos!), turn it over and apply a dot of glue to the centre.
2. Fold over one of the edges to the centre:
3. Apply glue to the flap you’ve just stuck in place, and fold the other edge flap on top of it:Hooray! This is starting to look like a bow!
4. Do the same with the slightly smaller bow piece (which, in our case is white):
5. The the bow base and apply glue to the centre:
6. Position the large bow on top:
7. Add glue to the centre and position the smaller bow on top of this. Add glue to centre:
8. Take the remaining band and place on top of glue at centre:
9. Turn over, add glue to centre and fold over each side to form bow. Apply glue liberally to alligator clip (as shown on right):
10. Apply alligator clip firmly to bow:

Your bow is now complete! Admire it! Enjoy it! Wear it, even!

The principle is the same for all of the other bows – you can use all the elements in the template to make lots and lots of different combinations! The one below uses the smaller pieces of the pattern – but don’t forget, as it’s an svg file you can size it up or shrink it down to as large or small as you can handle!

And you can make them as simple or elaborate as you wish…we got a bit carried away!

 

Fancy making your own bows? Get the bow-making template here!