Beautiful Embroidered Hair Bow Tutorial -

I absolutely love transforming my embroidery pieces into practical items. Crafting sewing projects and accessories from my creations allows me to be even more creative and nothing beats something you can actually use. While I wouldn’t call myself a master seamstress, I’ve developed some basic sewing skills over time because, let’s be honest, sewing and embroidery go together so well!

Lately, I have been longing to create an embroidered hair bow, and in this tutorial, I’m excited to walk you through my process and the materials I used to create one. The best part about this one is that you can easily do this craft in one afternoon; it’s so satisfying and fun!

embroidered hair bow with a goose design

How To Make an Embroidered Hair Bow

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase an item.

Supplies Needed

Linen – I used Earnest Quilt (Etsy)
4 inch Beechwood embroidery hoop (Amazon)
Embroidery floss
Water Soluble Solvy (Amazon) and a micron
Sewing machine
Tracing paper and a pencil (if you’re making your own design)
chalk or fabric marker

To create the hair bow, I used a free pattern that’s available from The Simple Life Company. The pattern offers 3 diferent sizes: I followed the one for the large bow.

For the embroidery design, check out my free mini embroidery designs page or get the goose design delivered to your email inbox.

Traceable Embroidery Design

Sign up and get a free pdf delivered straight to your inbox. You’ll also get occasional emails with helpful tips, tricks, and products recommendations.

First name

Email address

Thanks! Keep an eye on your inbox for updates.

Preparing The Bow

There are two ways you can prepare the fabric for embroidery:

mark the fabric pieces according to the pattern and leave the pieces uncut, or
cut out the pieces entirely before you get started.

I think it’s harder to embroider with a lot of extra fabric, so I decided to cut out the pieces first, but if you’re making a smaller bow it’s probably best to keep the fabric uncut.

Either way you approach this, it’s important to mark out the fabric so you can accurately determine what size the design will need to be to fit perfectly on the bow.

Also, keep in mind that you’ll want to leave a 1/4″ of margin around the edges to sew them together. Make sure that whatever design you use fits well within this area with a little bit of space around it to give you some room for error.

Creating And Transferring The Design

creating the goose design on tracing paper

If you want to create your own design, I suggest used tracing paper to mark out the size of the area you have to work with. Then create a rough sketch and finalize the design to your liking. (Check out my embroidery design process for more tips.)

water soluble solvy in an embroidery hoop

embroidery designed transferred onto the water soluble solvy

Once you’ve got the design you want to transfer, use your favorite transfer method to mark the design onto the fabric. For this project, I used water soluble Sulky and transferred it with a micron.

Position the design to your liking. (Remember to keep the design towards the bottom of the tail.)

Then place the fabric in the hoop. It’s ok if the hoop is a little bit larger than the fabric piece. Do your best to secure the fabric in it and then tighten the hoop.

tacking up the sides of the fabric step 1

tacking up the sides of the fabric step 2

If there are parts of the fabric that don’t fit in the hoop, tack up the sides by whip stitching along the side of the fabric and around the outside of the hoop. These will be temporary, but these stitches will evenly distribute tension on the fabric, helping to prevent any warping or puckering while you’re stitching.

Now you can get to stitching!

finished embroidery of a goose wearing a bow and leaves surrounding it.

Once you’ve finished the embroidery, remove the stitches tacking up the sides. Then remove any marks or stabilizer that you used to transfer the design.

Iron the fabric and then place the pieces of fabric right sides together to assemble the tail of the bow. (the back of the embroidery should be facing up) Finish sewing the pieces and following the pattern.

Brown hair bow with goose embroidered on it.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! I have a bunch of other tutorials on the blog to help you learn how to make many other embroidered accessories.

DIY Embroidered Scrunchie

Brooch Embroidery Tutorial

How To Make A Felt Book Corner

Amanda

Amanda is a hand embroidery teacher and artist. With over 15 years of experience in the craft industry and embroidery, she owns and runs Crewel Ghoul, sharing accessible tutorials and patterns to help inspire fellow crafters to get creative. In addition to running this website, she teaches on Skillshare and Youtube.