Wedding Blog

Today’s DIY rewind comes from Mrs. Emerald. Mrs. Emerald wanted to include bows on all of her invitations, but found that tying hundreds of bows was difficult, and often times messy. She solved this problem by coming up with a cleaner looking bow, and shows us all how to achieve the look! This DIY project was originally posted on March 29, 2007.

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Did I mention that my invites came in over a week ago from the printers?! And they look amazing, I’m so excited! But I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the best way to enclose them. I’ve been playing around with (and hence, wasting) vellum, and I think I’ve finalized my design. Yahoo!

My invites are 8.5″ x 5.5″ so I ordered 12″ x 12″ vellum from Paperandmore. With my handy dandy paper trimmer, I cut the vellum down to 8.5″ x 12″ and created a faux envelope to house the invite/response card, response envelope, etc. I purchased 100 yards of 5/8″ double face chocolate brown satin ribbon from JKM, and figured I would just tie a bow around the invite, and have a personalized tag with the invitee’s names on it, like so:

(I don’t like the color of the name tag backing, I will probably use chocolate brown).

The back has a flap opening just like an envelope, but I’m not gonna seal the sides.

Although I liked this idea overall, I wasn’t crazy about the bow cuz it looked rather messy (it’s hard to tie a perfect bow, let alone 100+ of them!). Not to mention it made a big ole’ bump in the envelope, and I didn’t want recipients thinking that they need to untie the bow in order to open the invite.

So on the train ride home the other night, I mentally played with the ribbon and decided to design a permanent bow. When I got home and actually tried it out, it was perfect! What’s perfect, you ask? Well, let me show you…

I cut two strips of ribbon, one 7″ and another 1.75″

Then with the 7″ piece, I used double sided tape (I swear, that is my favorite product right now!) and created a loop.

Next I took the 1.75″ ribbon and placed a small strip of tape along each end (hard to see in pic), and positioned both ribbons in a cross like this.

Fold one end over, and then the other end over, press firmly to seal tape.

End result? I can make one of these in about 30 seconds, and it’s so much fun, haha.

VOILA! So much cleaner, more minimalist, and oh-so-chic (in my opinion )! While I love the simplicity of this look, I will still have the name tag attached next to the bow (see pic 1) because I love the personalization aspect of it.

Tip: To my surprise, the double sided tape worked REALLY well for this project! But it sticks to the ribbon like no other, so you better position it right the first time. Once it goes on, its very difficult to remove without ruining the strip of ribbon!