Zipper Bow Tutorials Part One: White Flower Zipper Bow

ZIPPER BOW TUTORIALS PART ONE:

WHITE FLOWER ZIPPER BOW

Remember zipper bows are cute on adults too!

For this tutorial you will need:

small circle of felt (no bigger than a quarter)

scissors

zipper (I like to use a longer zipper on these kinds of bows. It's possible with a shorter zipper but much harder)

Needle and thread

Glue gun and glue sticks

A ribbon lined alligator clip (click here for tutorial)

We will start with your small circle of felt. Felt makes a great base for any bow because it doesn't move around a lot, it doesn't fray and hot glue sticks to it really well.

For this bow your circle shouldn't be bigger than a quater. In fact I actually cut mine down to about a dime size. Either one works.

Then you will take one end of your zipper and place it in the center of your felt. Put one stitch in it. In this picture I made my first needle insertion through the top and found that once I made a full stitch and came back through my thread got in the way of what I was doing. So I am going to suggest you make your first needle insertion through the bottom side of your felt. One full stitch means that you will go up and through from the bottom of your felt and then back through top to the bottom keeping your needle and thread out of your way. After securing your zipper to your felt. play around to see how many petals you can make with the length of your zipper. I usually try to make about five.

After you know how big you want your petals to be make your first petal loop and secure it down with a stitch.

Make your second petal straight across from the first and secure it down with a stitch.

Then you will make your 3rd, 4th, and 5th petals. Securing each down with a stitch. I have included picture so you can see how I did mine.

3rd petal

4th petal

and 5th petal.

Now you are going to tie off your thread to the back of your felt. If you know how to tie it off skip the next two pictures. If you don't keep reading.

Put your needle through a small piece of felt and DON'T pull it all the way through.

stop when you have a small loop like this and pass your needle through that loop and pull it all the way tight. Do this 2 or 3 times to make sure it's secure.

Trim up the felt on the back side of your bow if you need to. You don't want to be able to see any of the felt when you are looking at the front of your flower.

Now turn it over.

Your petal should look like this.

Now at this point you can do one of two things. You can cut off the excess zipper and put a cute button or old piece of jewelry in the middle like so...

or you can roll the excess zip to make a zipper center like this...

If you want to make a rolled zipper center take the opposite end of the zipper you have been working with, shown here...

and begin rolling it toward the center. Every turn you make put a small dot of glue from your glue gun so that it stays in place.

Once you have rolled it as much as you can it will look like this

Then you are going to take your glue gun and put a glob of hot glue in the center

Try too make sure the side of your zipper bow does not touch the glue until you are ready. Once you have your glob of glue take the end of the zipper that you rolled and twist it so that the teeth are facing you and the end with no teeth is in the glue. It should be standing straight up.

Your bow should now look like this...

Cute right? You can either leave it how it is if you like it or you can add another layer of petals. At this point I thought my zipper flower needed more so I decided to make another layer of petals. So you are going to start all over with a small piece of felt, the other half of your zipper and your needle and thread.

Continue all previous steps, making each petal and stitching it down until you have 5 petals EXCEPT this time you will want your petals to be just a tiny bit larger than your first row of petals you already made.

You will end up here. Cut off any excess zipper. Then put a glob of glue in the center of your 2nd layer of petals and place your first layer on top. TIP: when positioning my first layer onto my second layer, I like to make sure none of my petals are directly laying of top of each other. This way the flower looks more full and like it has more petals.

This is what your end result will look like!

If your want you can further embellish it will lace and feathers but since these were the only zippers I had that did have metal teeth I decided to leave them. Now you will need to add an alligator clip to the back of your bow. Click here for that tutorial

Cute as can be!

Zipper Bow Tutorials

ZIPPER BOW TUTORIALS

Zipper bows are a fun way to dress up and accessorize your children and yourself!

In this next tutorial I will show you how I made these four bows from zippers my mom picked up for me at garage sales for a few cents a piece. Since I am showing you how to make each bow I will divide the tutorial into several smaller posts to make this tutorial a little less overwhelming. You will start with the same set of instructions for each bow, which I have posted below. You will also need to know how to line your alligator clip with ribbon. (Click Here) for that tutorial

To start I went into my craft box where I keep the zippers my mom gave me. This is what I found. Lots of colors, but I am not going to lie I was a little disappointed in my selection. What makes zipper bows so cute is the big metal teeth. As you can see all of my color zippers have plastic teeth that are the same color as the zipper. Nevertheless, I was going to work with what I had and make them cute.

As I said, your first few steps for all the zipper bows are going to be the same so here they are...

Make sure your zipper is zipped up. Then you are going to cut the opposite end just above this large metal piece, I call the "stopper". TIP: try to cut in between the teeth so that you don't risk messing up your scissors.

Then zip your zipper down until the actual part you hold onto comes off. Now you will have two separate sides of your zipper. We will be using both for all of these tutorials.

Whatever bow you decide to make just remember that every bow looks cuter on someone's head! There have been so many times that I have made a bow and thought I didn't like it but after trying it on one of my girls I LOVED it!

For the white flower zipper bow click here.

For the peacock feather zipper bow click here.

For the circle flower zipper bow click here.

For the zipper, fabric combination flower bow click here.

Quick and Easy Redo

QUICK AND EASY REDO

I was going through my Valentines decorations when I ran across these. I bought these last year at a garage sale for $1! Not $1 a piece. ALL of them for $1! I knew I wanted to repaint them and it would be a quick and easy job but just didn't have time so I shoved them in a box and forgot about them. Now, a year later I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them.

So I gave them a makeover. I painted them white.

Normally I would have done a primer first but ran out of it on another project so I skipped that step.

After putting several coats of paint on them I roughed up the edges with a low girt sandpaper.

Then put some dark gray glaze on them

and wiped it off in certain areas to show off the details.

Here is my finished product. I never even realized one was different until I was done! I am going to be putting these up in my girls' bathroom. However, I am waiting on a shelf to be made so for now I am going to throw them in with the rest of my Valentine decor.

Here's a Sneak Peak of my next project!

Fashion on a Dime

FASHION ON A DIME

Jaysa Sue

Jaysa's jacket I bought at a garage sale and the tags were still on it! I can't remember how much I paid for it. I don't believe it would have been more than $3 dollars. If it was I wouldn't have bought it. Her jeans are from the Children's Place and were bought at Savers for $3.99.

Close up of her cute jacket.

Jaysa's bow is made of things found at garage sales. My mom found a bunch of old zippers and let me have a few to make little girls bows with. She also bought the feathers for me at a garage sale and the button I found in a big bag of old buttons I bought from an older couple. (tutorial coming on zipper bows!)

Paisley Mae

Her cardigan is from Savers I can't really remember how much I paid for this one either but it wasn't more than a few dollars. Her shirt I bought at a garage sale for .50 cents. Her jeans were $5 on clearance at Children's Palace and...

I paid .50 cents for her shoes at a garage sale!

Paisley's bow was made from fabric, lace and old jewelry I found at a garage sale also.

Painting your Paintable Wallpaper

PAINTING YOUR PAINTABLE WALL PAPER

No I didn't find my paintable wallpaper at a garage sale, although I have seen some before. I thought this was a good opportunity to show you all how I gave my wallpaper in the center of my fireplace a faux bronzed ceiling tile look.

Here is my before picture of my fireplace. As you can see, it needed some help. When I bought this fireplace at a garage sale we had not yet bought our house. I had always pictured my home having a fireplace so I took a chance and bought it anyway. After finding a home we loved you can imagine my dissapointment when a fireplace was not included. I was unsure about what I was going to do with the one that was sitting in my garage! Once we moved in I decided that not everything had to be practical. I could have a fireplace that was purely decorative if I wanted. So up it went. But what was I going to do with the blank wall where my fire should be burning? I couldn't just leave it bare. I thought about little tin ceiling tiles but knew they would be too expensive. Then I found paintable wallpaper and thought it would be perfect. I bought my paintable wall paper at Lowes because I really loved one of the patterns they had. In hindsight I wish I would have bought my wallpaper online at this website called Wallpaper Wholesaler. The wallpaper is much cheaper on this website however they are sold in double rolls so you have to buy two of them. I have another paintable wallpaper project that is pretty big so this would have been a better bet for me. If your paintable wallpaper project is small you may prefer to buy your paper at Lowes. The particular wallpaper I chose from Lowes covers 56 square feet and was a little under $20. On the Wallpaper Wholesale website most rolls were $12.99. But remember you have to buy two which means you would be spending $25 plus shipping.

So now that I had my paintable wallpaper I had to figure out how to give it the best look. I loved this two toned look.

I thought I could recreate this look with some of the paints I already had at my house so I went out to the garage and got the paint we used in my youngest daughters bedroom. Before you put your wall paper on your wall always test out your colors and painting techniques on a strip. Paintable wall paper comes off the wall easily but I didn't want to waste any.

I used a medium brown as my base coat.

And a Martha Stewart Metallic paint as a top coat to give my paper more details and definition. I think this was about $6 at Home Depot.

When you are choosing your paint color, I would suggest that you use two colors. If you just simply want the metallic look without any other color showing through I would still suggest using a plain base coat that is really similar to your metallic color. Paintable wallpaper is really dense, which means it takes a lot of paint to cover your first coat. Depending on how big your project is you may not have enough metallic paint to cover the whole thing without using a base coat. If your project is small enough you could also just buy a sample paint of your base coat instead of an entire quart to keep your cost down.

One more piece of advice when your shopping for your paintable wallpaper is to try to get paper that already has adhesive on the back. This will save you time and money. After following the directions on how to apply the paper (we soaked ours in the tub to get it all wet at the same time) we put it in the center of our fireplace. I was really surprised at how easy it was to work with. We were able to place it on the wall and slide it around to make sure we had it in the right spot.

C.J. making sure the pattern lines up.

The directions say to wait 24 hours before painting....oops i didn't read that part. I let mine dry overnight and then painted it and it worked out just fine. Don't forget to tape off your area so you don't get paint where it's not supposed to be!

Here I am painting my base coat.

My base coat after drying

After it's dry take your metallic paint and lightly brush it on top of your base coat allowing some of your base coat to still show through. Sorry about the blurry picture

Letting my metallic top coat dry.

Here is the difference between using one color of paint and lightly brushing a second paint color on top of your base coat. Major difference! With my next paintable wallpaper project I think I will go a step further and VERY lightly brush a third gold metallic paint on top of my browns. Remember, you can use however many colors you want!

The finished product! I love it!

All decor was bought at garage sales! I paid $75 for the fireplace, $17 for the metal embellished mirror and $15 dollars a piece for the large wood sconces!

and I still have lots of wall paper left over!

I am linking to these parties:

http://caribbeanmissionarywife.blogspot.com/2012/04/t-time-72-and-link-party.html