 Hello, bum-making for groomers. We've recently had some quests for fabric bow ties and I'm attempting my very first video to show some people how to do them. First you're going to need some fabric, something to cut it with, a ruler, some rubber bands. I chose black this time because they'll be more visible on the video. Then we'll get into a few other things as we go along. I'm working here with a half yard of basic cotton fabric. What we want to do to start out is to get your fabric straightened out. Put your selvedges together. I'm going to fold it in thirds because it makes it easier to cut for me. I do a lot of production cutting since I have to come up with about 80 different things for the week. I'm going to stick a few pins in here just so things don't slide around. It kind of helps. We have two groomers that work at our shop so I do have to produce quite a bit of stuff in a week. There we go. You might be wondering what my little pieces of tape are on here. I stick those on there. It helps with me measuring things. I don't have to individually measure because when I do these I usually do five or six different pieces of fabric at a time. What I'm going to be doing first is setting up my fabric here so that I've got a nice straight edge. You probably can't see the lines but I'm straightening my salvage edge here along that line so we can get it nice and straight. I'm going to put my cutter work this time. I think we've got time for a new blade. Okay, with any luck, I'm going to cut it through there. Like I said, it needs to be like, we'll continue on. I'm back. I went and changed the blade on my rotary cutter so hopefully we can go along with this a little faster. Much better. Nice clean cut. Now if you don't happen to have a rotary cutter, you can do this with scissors. It just do a little bit different. I didn't have a rotary cutter. I would simply do like this. I'm going to hit measure, grab my pencil, make a little line, make sure you see it. And then cut straight through the scissors. Now if making the size, I have a little bit of leftover fabric here. I don't want to waste anything so I'm going to go ahead and trim that up even. We'll use that maybe to make a binding on some of the bow ties. Everything's cut. I'm going to stop a minute and change over to the iron. Okay, I've got all my strips cut. Now we're going to iron them. I'm applying a little bit of spray starch. It helps everything stick together as you go. This is just a little ironing pad that I picked up somewhere down the line. It works great. Take a top. You don't have something like this, then towel. I'm going to pick up a pillowcase, anything like that. Now what I'm doing right here is I'm folding my fabric over. I've got my iron set on cotton. I'm just ironing one side of the fabric down. Go along the whole length of your fabric. I'm going to keep it as straight as possible. Okay, flip it over. Fold it down again. And iron it again. And tuck it under there. I'm going to go along and do this for all of your different fabric pieces. This is going to give you approximately about a two-inch throw tie, somewhere in that area. I'm going to have to two-inch. If you cut your strips at, you've got to cut them at four and a quarter. Okay, we've got our strip done. We'll continue on and do the rest of the strips. I'll be back in a minute. Okay, we're back and I have all of my strips ironed out here. With a half an inch, excuse me, a yard of fabric. Cut the way I cut it about four and a quarter inches wide. And about eight and three quarters inches long. You should end up with about 20 or 20 bow ties out of a half a yard of fabric, which makes it a pretty cheap project. I've already pre-measured this. That's why I got the little pieces of tape there. It keeps me from having to measure each one individually. Just cut them off as I go. I played around for quite a while trying to get the exact sizes down. I said I do quite a few of these and so I like to keep my costs down and get the maximum amount out of my fabric. Now see, we've got just a little tail left over that salvage. Just cut that off. Okay, we've got everything cut. Now we need to make a bow tie. Normally I would probably pick a color rubber band that matched the fabric a little bit better, but I figured you could see the black. Alright, got your little piece here. Kind of find a center on it. I'm going to flip it in and flip it over, just like that. And then over. We've got your little bow tie. Okay, going to pinch up and pinch down. Hold it for a second. I use these cheap rubber bands on this because I don't want to use my good grooming bands. We'll use those for other things. Now we have a bow tie. Kind of center. Fold it over. That lapse. I usually fold it so that this flap is going that way because I'm usually coming this way with rubber bands and that way I don't get it caught up. Pinch down. When I do these, I do up a bunch of fabric at a time. And I'll sit and watch TV and just crank out boats. Bow ties bows. These could also be girl bows if you did a girly fabric one more time. Find a center. Fold it over. Pinch up. Pinch down. Band. I'll use fingers work here. One more on that. These are kind of large rubber bands. A lot of times I have a little bit smaller ones. These are some of those bracelet bands. Okay. I'm going to stop for a second and then I'll show you another thing that I do. I'm going to pause for a few minutes. I went ahead and finished cutting all of the rest of the strips that we did. And I folded them in half here. That's how I store them because I don't do everything at once. One little trick that you can do. I love these snack storage bags. Get them at Walmart or Dollar Storing with. They're the kind of long narrow ones. They work great through this. I just put all my strips in here. Nice and clean to let get ready to finish them up. Because I usually have several different kinds going. Put them in there. I can just grab a bag and start putting them together. Now that we have our basic bow done, we have to figure out how we're going to finish it, how we're going to attach it to a collar. There's several different ways to do this. I've seen all kinds. The one thing about the bow, if you just try to slip it on with this, it might work. But you're probably going to end up messing things up and you don't really have your bow finished. So what we're going to do is finish them out. I'm going to start with a little ribbon here. I'm going to show this color. Hopefully my glue gun's hot enough. Just going to put a dab of glue. Kind of put it on each side of the rubber band because once in a great while you'll get a rubber band. But if you hit it with hot glue, it's going to pop. Come around. Come around. Just a little bit of hot glue on there again. Pull it nice and tight. I don't cut my pieces beforehand because it kind of wastes ribbons. Now we've got a finished bow. You could put an embellishment on there if you would like. Now attaching it to the collar, a lot of times what I do is I use fold over elastic. But people can use rubber bands if you take, you want to use a rubber band. Put a couple dots of glue on here. Slip a couple of bands like that. You can use any old scrap of fabric to do this. Cut the rubber band. Now you've got some bands to slip it over the collar. Actually I would have finished that off first. That's this one. Grab the wrong one. We'll do it on the finished one. Come on glue gun. There we go. Rubber bands up there. I told you it's my first video. There we go. That's on the finished one. You can slip it on the dog collar with the rubber bands. Some people like to use these little hair tie things. You can get them at the dollar store. If I use these, I put them on first and then put the band on. I'll glue there. Forgive my poor old glue gun. It's pretty nasty. I put the metal part underneath this. I'll put a little bit more glue on there. Same thing we did before. Push it down. I bought some bulk glue. It is the stringiest stuff I've ever worked with. I've got a whole case of it, so I'm having to deal with it. I've got two nice little tabs. There you can slip over a collar. The rubber bands are cheap and easy. The little bands here. My favorite is fold over a elastic. I know a lot of people don't use that, but I am in love with it. This is a piece. This is about 12 inches long. This is a very stretchy stuff. These are for kids headbands and stuff. I will do it up in 10 inch lengths. 12 inch length, 14 inch lengths. You can see a 12 inch length is pretty good size. Go around a lot of medium size and put a handle at the collar. I go ahead when I do this and glue it on first. Then come back and do my center. I have collars to put on. I have finished. I have three different ways. I have never been a fan of that. Now I will show you how to store these things. I do them up in a assembly line. I go through and cut everything. I will do my packaging up and put things together. Then I will have a bunch like this that I will finish out all at one time with a fold over elastic. I store them on these small smoothy straws. It helps to keep everything from crushing down. I can just store them up like this in shoe boxes. Everything is ready. When I go to put my bands and stuff on in this, I can just sit and do that all at one time. I hope this video helps you. If you have any questions, please ask and excuse my mistakes. I will try to do better. I am planning on doing one on simple bows and on bandanas. Thank you for your time.