Here is a picture of – as my daughter put it – boring blue water shoes.  They were the only ones at the store that fit her properly and I didn’t have time to go searching elsewhere.  So the shoes were bought with a promise to add some bows or flowers and (hopefully) some pink!  Turns out I only have 1 pink flower in my sewing stash, and, since there are two shoes and I am big on being symmetrical, we went with blue instead.  Here’s what I did in quick tutorial style.

Grab some 1″ blue grosgrain ribbon and cut it into two lengths – one for each shoe. Fold each side behind into a “bow”. Thread your needle and stitch a quick running stitch through the middle of all of the layers.

Next, gather the first round of stitches and sew back through the gathers in the opposite direction. Knot your thread and trim the ends.

Here is your front view of the bow.

This is the back view. Use a hot glue gun to seal all of the raw edges. These ribbons fray like crazy. It is also good to seal the knot on your thread.

I had stashed some crocheted(?) ribbon that I bought on a huge sale once. So I used that for the centre of the bow.

I cut the ribbon on either side of 2 of the flowers, leaving some length to fold around the bow’s centre. Try to sew through the ribbon with out it fraying, and use some more hot glue to seal everything.

After that, apparently I forgot to take any pictures because I was so excited to get the shoes finished! I took another bit longer length of light blue ribbon and folded that into another “bow” without the gathers and hand stitched the whole thing like crazy.  Two things here. I happened to have some matching blue “topstitching thread” which is a bit heavier weight to sew it together.  Also, the hot glue is really hard to hand-stitch through. So I am basically hoping they make it through our cottage weekend without falling off.  I sealed the whole thing again with hot glue after I had finished the final stitching. And, here they are…

I’m super happy with how they turned out. My daughter approves, though she did again voice the opinion that they should have pink –  “at least somewhere”! I am stubborn, they match her bathing suit perfectly, and her bathing suit is not pink! I will have to see if I can get some pictures when we are up at the cottage and post them another time.

By the way – the rolled towel in the last photo is another project I am working on and will post another quick tutorial once I am finished. If you can’t wait for my version, the tutorial I will be basing mine on is here, by Anna Maria Horner. In case you don’t recognize the name, she is a great fabric designer – check out her blog!