How To Make a Bow Hair Clip

Welcome back to the blog Minties! 

Today I am making the cutest accessory for my daughters, a cute bow clip! For supplies, we will need: 

• Grosgrain ribbon; a thicker ribbon that has ridges in it. 
• Metal hair clips; you can find this at a beauty supply store or even your local Walmart. Don’t worry about sharpness, they will be wrapped with ribbon.
• 1.5 inch ribbon
• 3/8 inch ribbon
• Scissors or rotary blades and cutting mat
• Some sort of a lighter or match
• 1 tea light
• Hot glue gun with glue sticks 

Let’s get started. 

The part that is making the bow needs to be cut to 5 3/4 ; this should be your “fat” ribbon. Then we need the small part to go around the center of the bow to be 2 inches. The longer, skinnier piece will actually be covering the clip, so it should be cut to 4 inches. 

Once we cut our ribbon, we are actually going to burn the edges. If you purchased a lace ribbon, which would state it is 100% cotton- DO NOT BURN THIS! The only thing that we can burn is the grosgrain or anything that is 100% polyester. When you burn the end of it- it will melt. When doing this, do not put this directly into the fire, just put it close enough to the fire that it melts the very edge so that it doesn’t fray once we put it on to our clip. 

Now that we have done let’s make the bow!

First step, is to put the ribbon for the bow, down flat and fold it in half perfectly. Press and crease it so that you know where the center of your bow is. Once you crease it, you’re going to open it up and put a line of hot glue in the center. Then fold the edges over to meet in the center. Move fast when doing this because hot glue drives fairly fast. Watch your fingers and don’t burn yourself! At this point, we have the beginning of a bow. Make sure you are on the side where the seam met and put a dab of glue in the center and now fold it in half, the long way. Press it lightly but make sure the glue is flat. Open it back up a little bit, just enough so we can take the ends and bring it back towards the crease that we initially started with. Make sure that your crease lines line up, so you don’t get a crooked bow. 

What I like to do- is fold it  and hold it open slightly and tuck the glue gun in so I can put the dabs of glue and it’s already in the spot that I wanted in and I hold it until it dries. This shouldn’t take long since hot glue dries so fast. Now we have a bow and its time to put the ribbon around it! 

This next step requires you to move fast, put a little slit of glue on the top of the ribbon and open up the ribbon and literally let it clamp down. 

Once it clamps down and its in place, put glue all the way to the end of the ribbon, fold it all the way over, make sure its glued really nice and then put the little dab of glue on the hair clip so that it is safely covered. Hold it really tight until it dries. 

If at any point you’d like to see what this looks like, feel free to check out my YouTube video for more specifics and visuals on this example of a bow clip. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO6jYHcsL_I&t=598s

Now that the clip is covered, put it down and grab your bow. Place the ribbon on the center of the clip and make sure its even. Once you have the bow where you’d like it, grab your skinny ribbon and put a dab of glue on the very tip. Open the clip up and put it right in the under part of the clip. At this point, it should be similar to the letter T shape. Put a little dab of glue on the back of the bow and place it right over the T shape. Put glue on the short ribbon but not on the very end. Take it and wrap around while opening it up and glue it on the inside too. If you have a little bit of extra you can go ahead and trim it off. I prefer to just glue it and press up. This part if your preference. 

TA-DA! We’ve officially made a bow clip together. Who will you be giving your bow clip too? I’d love to see what your bows look like, so please be sure to tag me in your social media posts at @WillowMintProps so that I can repost on my page too!