Use A Fork – To Make A Bow!

Making bows can be a fiddly business.  We loop, and tie, and pull on skinny little pieces of ribbon and hope when we’re done that we end up with something kind of straight and pretty looking. It can leave even crafty folk feeling rather fumble fingered.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little loom or something to make the job easier?

The good news is it’s simple to make a loom for tying bows.  Just walk in the kitchen and get a fork.

Or go get a comb.  Or a rake.  Or a potato masher.

Just find yourself something with pointy tines in the width of the bow you want to make and viola!

You’ll be making your own bows. 🙂

I used a large serving size fork for the pictures in the tutorial below, which made a nice bow about 1.5″ across.  You can use a regular table size fork too, but you’ll have very tiny mini-sized bows.

Here’s the fork method (and then we’ll look at a few more ideas below too).  It’s probably easiest just to follow the pictures, but I’ll give a brief explanation for each step as well.

How To Use A Fork To Make A Bow

 

1. Wrap the ribbon about the fork so that one end of the ribbon is laying behind the fork, and one end of the ribbon is in front of the fork.

 

2.  Take the end of ribbon that is laying behind the fork, bring it around to the front, and pass it between the middle two tines of the fork, BELOW the ribbon in the front.

 

3.  Take the other end of the ribbon that is in the front, and pass it between the middle two tines of the fork, ABOVE the rest of the ribbon in the front.

 

4.  Turn the fork over and tie the two ends of the ribbon tightly.  I found it helpful in this step, to adjust the ends of the ribbon so they were hanging as I would want them to look in the finalized bow. You may even want this side to be the front of your bow.

 

5.  Remove the bow from the fork and trim the ends as needed.

 

Once you know the method, you can branch out from there and use other household items for this trick too, or you can wrap the ribbon around a few more times for fluffier bows.  Here’s a few ideas to get you started:

Use a Potato Masher – to make bows for clothing embellishment

Use a wide tooth comb – to get many different sizes

Use a fine tooth comb – to create bows for gift wrapping

Use a garden rake -for a big burlap bow

Use a fork with two colors of ribbon – to make bows for Christmas ornaments

And if none of those utensils fit your needs, I found a photo of craft/popsicle sticks glued together to make your own widget to loop the ribbon around (sorry I could not locate the source of this photo). When all else fails – just make your own!