Leatherette Bows | Helen Williams | Silhouette UK Blog

Leatherette Bow | Silhouette Leatherette Sheets

Hi everyone, Helen here today.

This year I wanted to make something cute for my little girl for St David’s Day. So I decided to make a little bow set for her.

Here is how I did it.

The leatherette material is very soft and bends easily. So it is perfect to make hair bows out of.

Step One: Open your selected file in Silhouette Studio. I chose this double bow design as I wanted something quite large, but there are lots of nice bow templated available in the Silhouette Store.

Step Two: Once you have opened the box design it is useful to resize the canvas size so that you can resize the design to fit onto the leatherette material. To do this open the ‘page setup’ menu and go to the ‘page set up’ tab. Using the size drop down menu selected customise. Then type in the size of the material into the width and length boxes. This will resize the canvas.

Step Three: Now that you have the canvas sized correctly click on the bow template and use the corners of the bow to resize the bow template so that it fits within the canvas.

Step Four: Navigate to the send screen and select the ‘leatherette’ setting in the drop down menu. Load the mat into your Silhouette and press send to cut the leatherette. I cut two bows out one from the gold and one from the while leatherette.

I wanted to add yellow felt for St David’s Day to the design. You can cut felt with the Silhouette, however I didn’t have all of the materials that I needed and as I just wanted to make a one off design I decided to cut the felt out by hand using the bow design as a template. This was very difficult, and I wasn’t happy with the result. I decided to use the stencil material to stick onto the felt so that I could use it as a template that would be easier to cut around. Here is how I did it.

Step One: Load the stencil material into the Silhouette.

Step Two: Select the ‘Stencil’ setting on the Silhouette drop down menu. Then press send to cut it out.

Step Three: Pull out the stencils and stick them onto the felt. Cut around the stencils.

Now that all of the pieces have been cut out it is time to assemble your bow. I used a hot glue gun to stick the pieces together. Before I assembled the bows I tried different ways of layering the bow pieces together until I was happy with the look of each bow.

Step One: Fold over the end of each bow piece and glue them in the middle to create the bow shape.

Step Two: Glue each layer of the bow together starting with the bottom and working your way up. Once you have assembled all of the layers glue the band around the bow to create a neat shape.

Step Three: Glue a button onto the front of the bow. Then glue either a hair slide or a hair band to the bottom of the bow.

Allow the bows to dry and then they are ready for use.

This project was simple and easy to create.

The leatherette was great to work with and adding the felt meant that there was a nice extra bit of colour in the design.

It was easy to make up in a night.

I would use this design again and make it up in school or team colours for older children.

– Helen Williams –

• Design Used: Double Split Bow Two Toned
Design Store Artist: Jamie Lane Designs
Design Store ID: 283387 > Download