Bow Garland

Bring a soft and feminine flair to your decor with this pretty ribbon bow garland. This super simple bow garland is made in minutes and can be used all year round!

Hi friends! I have a couple quick and easy spring crafts to share with you this year. Well, technically this bow garland is not specifically for spring and Easter, that just happens to be what I am decorating for right now. 🙂 Bows are all the rage right now so this garland is totally on trend and the great thing about this easy garland is that it is customizable to whatever event or holiday you are decorating for.

For this bow garland, I used sheer organza ribbon that is 7/8″ thick because I already had it on hand from my years of being a Stampin’ Up demonstrator. That seems like a lifetime ago. Ha! You can use any kind of ribbon that you have around. If you want a more bold look, go for a solid ribbon, however this sheer ribbon worked well for the pastel colors that I was working with on my Easter mantel.

I will share more of my mantel in the next post, which will be the tutorial for the other garland on this mantel, the Easter Bunny garland. That was also a quick and easy project!

Watch the quick video

Don’t want to read all the instructions? I have included a video in this post showing you how to make this bow garland. If you can’t see the video, turn off your ad blocker. Also, if you ever want to slow down the video, just click on the three dots in the lower right hand corner of the video and you can change the playback speed. If you want more detailed instructions, continue reading.

Supplies to make a bow garland

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

Ribbon – I used sheer organza ribbon like these, but you can use any kind of ribbon in different colors for this project.
Hot glue gun
Scissors
24″ ruler or tape measure

How to make a bow garland

This will be a quick and painless tutorial if you know how to do one thing. Tie a bow! 😉 I will give you some tips along the way but really it is so easy that it may not even require a tutorial. The first step is to cut your ribbons into 20″ strips. To drape across the front of my mantel, I used three bows in each of the five colors, which made for 15 bows in total. You may need a couple more than that depending on the space you are using them in.

I thought it was easier to tie the bows and immediately glue them on as I went along making the garland. So in advance, I determined the color pattern I wanted to use. I didn’t want the colors in rainbow order so I made sure to not put analogous colors next to each other.

How to tie a bow

I wanted my bows to all look similar so I was a little more careful and intentional with how I tied them. Take one of the strips of ribbon and fold over the top third of the strip.

Hold the ribbon with your thumb and forefinger about 2″ down from the fold. Take the long end of the ribbon and wrap it around your thumb and the backside of the ribbon. Fold the end in a loop and stick that through the opening where your thumb is. Pull on the loops to tighten the knot, and pull on the ends to shorten the loops back up. Do this a couple times to get a nice tight knot. You will have to work it a little to get the bow tight and even on each loop. See the video if you have any questions on that process.

To make sure the bows were consistent in the garland, I made the loops of the bows each measure about 2 ” in length.

Glue the garland together

Run a bead of hot glue on the edge of the right loop of the first bow and glue it to the second bow, holding them together for a couple seconds. Be careful though, it will be hot since it is sheer fabric! For the remainder of the bows, I glued the left loop and stuck it onto the previous bow in the garland.

To make the bows even prettier, I trimmed the ends at 45 degree angles.

Continue gluing the bows together following your color pattern until your bow garland is complete.

All that is left is to display your handiwork. I hung mine on my mantel just looping the ends bows around some command hooks that were already on there. You could also drape this over a bookshelf or display it on a wall. There are lots of ways to use this pretty garland.

Here are more garland ideas that you can use anytime of the year:

I really like the soft look of the organza ribbon bow garland. I know I will be trying this again in the future with some other kinds and colors of ribbons. It is just too easy and adorable not to use again! I will be back soon to share this other cute bunny garland too! Chat soon!