How-To's Day: Alessandra & Paul's Bow Tie Wedding Decor

The bride and KC both love bows, so it was pretty clear from the beginning that some handmade bow ties were on the horizon.  Using a variety of extra fabrics and clothes and some strong little magnets, Make Shop Live team completed an assortment of 140 handmade cloth bow ties.

KC did a great many tasks at our friend's wedding in Brooklyn.  One of the most fun projects was the seating cards for each guest at the reception. The bows are a variation on a Make Shop Live holiday project post here. For Alessandra's wedding we dropped the scale down to make the bow roughly 5" wide by 3" tall. The bow is held in place with a magnet for the fastening just like this magnetic brooch project we featured in May here.

 
To wear the bow ties as a brooch all you need to do is slip a magnet on the other side of your clothing to hold it in place. Best part of the magnet brooches is you don't ruin your fancy clothes like sometimes you do with a pin back that snags.

We started with some old clothes shown below and dug through our reserved stash of navy and pink fabrics for the assortment of bows.  To make some of the pinks look more vintage and antiqued, KC tea stained the fabrics first before constructing the bows.  For a look at how to tea stain fabric of your own here is how to tea stain fabric. 

Utilizing the project instructions here for the bow, the main variation for these magnetic brooches is placing the magnet inside the backing of bow as you assemble it as shown below:

Using a magnetic board from Ikea we were able to display all the bows and seating cards quickly and easily since they all had super strong magnets inside them.

Here are some color sample tests KC sent Alessandra to show what colors were available to Make Shop Live in Navy and Pink.

Enjoy! and have fun!!!

If you try this project out we'd love to see some pictures :)

XOXO, KC