Summer Bow Master Class Lesson 21 |How to Attach a Bow to a Grapevine and Draping Ribbon Tails

So we've got our weaving needle. When you're putting it on a grapevine, what you want to do is go through a few layers of the grapevine like that. Can you see? So I'm in about the middle of the grapevine. Use your weaving needle because you see how flexible these are? And I just pull it through and then when I pull it up, I have a better chance of getting it in the position that I want it to be in on that grapevine. Then I'm just going to twist it, twist the wire. If I need to, I'll go around it if I feel like it's not tight enough, but generally it is. Let me show you one more thing. If you want it to be way up at the top, I just had it. Where'd I put it? I knew I had it that way. If you want it to be at the top, then what you're going to do is you're going to take your weaving needle, get your wire or whatever you're using, and go from the middle or even the top to the middle. Okay, that way the center of your bow will be at the top. Okay, so that's how you kind of determine where you want to put your wire for your bows. So like if you were going to do it on the side, it just all depends on how you want it to look, where you want it to be located, wherever you want it to be located. This is where your center point is going to be, so if you want it to be down here, then you would start your tie down here. If you want it to be in the middle, you start your tie in the middle, and at the top you put it at the top. I do, I have a tool caddy, but you know, mostly the stuff just sits on my thing up here. I keep saying I'm going to get organized. All right, so I kind of want it to be in the middle, so I'm going to go in the middle up through the top. So where you want it to land is where you need to start your tie. Okay, there we go. Now I'm just going to twist it around. Okay, all right, now to fluff these, there's not really a whole lot you need to do. You're just going to kind of stick your hands inside it, move it around. Okay, these are normal fluff, right? So you twist them back and forth to get it out of that center. This is why you're fluffing it. You see that right there where it's all kind of stuck down in there? If I try to pull this out without having twisted it first, it's not going to come loose. So you have to twist it so that you can get the entire piece out and it will fluff up nicely. See, same thing right there. See how it's kind of stuck in there? It's kind of folded over. So you've got to pull that out in order to get it to fluff properly. So when I'm talking about breaking the bow, I'm talking about breaking it from being stuck in the center. Remember, always start from the bottom and go to the top. Are you? I really need to get better about it. Well, I'm planning on moving my room around, so that's been my excuse why I haven't cleaned up my stuff, but I can't leave that as an excuse anymore. I just need to do it. Makes it hard for me to find stuff. There we go. We've got the bow fluffed out. Now, this is what I wanted to show you. Okay. It's an ongoing thing for me too. When you have ribbons on a grapevine, one of the greatest things to do is to give your tails some personality as well. So you can take, this is why, can you see why now they like to use the jelly ribbon? Because look at what a nice little loop that makes. Can you see that? So I can take more of my bind wire. Okay. I'm going to put it in the middle here. Remember, I'm going to squash it up because it's too hard to do it if I don't just go ahead and do it. Put my little thing through here. I don't know why I did that. There we go. And then I can use my little bind wire to tie it off and I'll fluff it out. And look how cute that is. See that? So when you're working with ribbons on a grapevine, it's really great to go ahead and start to make little loops on your grapevine. So you can do the same thing with every one of your ribbons. You can do them in different places. I kind of like to do this. It almost starts looking like our spider bow, except long. We just need another piece. This one's usually pretty easy. I can usually do this one without a weaving needle because it's just a small ribbon, much easier. So you want about, I would say a good hand, like, you know, from here to here from the grapevine to the ribbon. Let's make a little bit. This can go across the two. You can go, like, sideways. You see this? There's no set rule that says you have to do it a certain way, okay? The fun thing about the ribbons is you can do unexpected things, okay? And when you're doing a grapevine, you don't always have to do a ton of greenery and stuff. You can do really gorgeous ribbons and bows and then a pull sign. And that could be it. That could be the whole thing. So we could go this way with this one. We could go in between. We could go up here. You can really do anything you want. You can also go all the way down around. That also looks cool. Everything you do is unexpected. You're so funny. See, and all I do is just put a little bind wire there, tie it down, trim it off, do the other side. See how cool that looks? And you can, you can add more tails to the bottom. The trick is to put it underneath your bow. So underneath your bow in order to make it look like it's coming out from the bow. So you see when I do this, I'm looking about that high before I do my little. So that kind of helps me determine the spacing that I need. Okay. Oh, look, there's an easy spot here. Have y'all ever done something like this? It's fun. Okay. There we go. Just because you did it one way on one side doesn't mean you have to do the same thing on the other side. Okay. It's up to you. Just right through there. See how I just kind of fluff it up so I can make sure it's going to do what I want it to. Okay. So, um, no, when I'm doing, when I'm doing grapevines and I'm doing like the ribbon and stuff like that, this is how I do things. Okay. I'm going to put the bow on first. I'm going to put my largest elements on first. Well, let me rephrase that. It depends on what I'm trying to do. If I'm going to do a big bow like this with tendrils everywhere, then I'm going to do this first and then add the greenery. Okay. And the reason being is because you're going to be able to, um, you're going to be able to use less greenery if you are filling up with something larger. Okay. But you can, like if I do in a C shape where I have greenery here and greenery there, I do generally put the bow in towards the end. But if the bow is going to be the largest part of my I'm going to put that on first. Yeah. Okay. See how I have, Oh, okay. I must not have tied it tight enough. You can also have things kind of hanging down in the middle. You can add ones to come all the way down here. Are y'all still talking about storage? So watch, if you take like some extra ribbon, what you can do, just take some of your bind wire. Okay. Put it on your ribbon like this. Okay. Let's flip this around so you can see what I'm doing. So underneath the bow here, I'll come in, I'll find a spot to tie it on, but it needs to be under the bow. Okay. Reason being is you want it, you see how now it looks like it came right from the bow. And so if I want to bring it all the way down here, then it's easy for me to do. And I don't have to try to add all of these in when I am doing my bow, because you don't really know exactly how much you're going to need. So you can add this part in after you've gotten your bow in. But I thought it might be really fun for y'all to see how you can really use ribbon to do a whole lot more than you're probably thinking of. This also looks really great on the evergreen wreaths, but see how you can, you can have short tails hanging in the middle. You can have these long ones that come down the center. Isn't that cool? See that? Doesn't that look fun? Yeah. So if you think about it this way, okay, if you have a really large bow or a really large sign, you kind of want to put that in first because then you need to see how things are going to fit around that. So I tend to do whatever's going to be the largest element first. Let's see how cool that is.