This is a continuation of a previous article, Do I Need Church Decorations, and I thought I would explain one of the points in the article. I talked about how my aunt and I ran to every Wal-Mart in the Dallas area buying out a particular silver ribbon and pulling an all-nighter to create enough pew bows for the church. Lucky for me, our church only has fourteen pews, so it wasn’t a huge project, but still quite an undertaking for us who didn’t know what we were doing. Up until a few weeks before the wedding, I hadn’t even thought of purchasing or designing church decorations. I knew I wanted them, but just didn’t know what to do, and so I pushed it out of my mind. When I finally decided to start looking at church decorations, I went to my florist, and they wanted to charge me around $20 per pew bow!!! No way! So I went to my aunt’s house in Dallas, and we set to work on learning how to create pew bows. So, if you are like I was before the wedding, searching for church decorating ideas, and want to learn how to make pew bows, I’ll tell you how we did it.
Pick Out a Ribbon for Your Pew Bows
The first thing you need to do is to pick out what kind of ribbon you want to use for your pew bows. I chose a sparkly silver wire ribbon that was about 2 or 3 inches wide. I found that for the size of pew bow I wanted, I would need one roll of ribbon per pew bow, not even to mention the tails (sorry, I’m not sure of the “technical” name, but the two pieces of ribbon that hang down from the pew bow) .
Start Making Your Pew Bow
Okay, let me start out by saying that neither of us were very crafty, but we were willing to try. So, what I’m explaining will work, but may not be how ‘professionals’ would advise making a pew bow, so take it with a grain of salt. We started out by deciding how wide we wanted the bow to be. Wanting it to be about 10 inches in diameter, we took the end of the ribbon and laid out 10 inches on the table, then looped the ribbon back to the starting edge of the ribbon, and we kept looping the ribbon back and forth until we had about 5 loops, getting a little smaller on each of the loops. Then, with the ribbon left over, we wrapped it around the middle of the bow, and hot glued it there. We then measured out ribbon for the tails of the pew bow, and hot glued that to the back of the pew bow. Again, probably not the most professional method for creating a pew bow, but like I said, it works.
Decorating Your Pew Bow
Once you have your pew bows created, you may want to add some decoration to them. For example, I wanted the first few rows of pews to be for family members, so I decorated some of the pew bows with peach ribbon roses a friend had made, and the other pew bows with small white silk flowers, where everyone else would sit. Those also, were attached with super glue. Hey, all the ladies in my family were teachers, super glue works on nearly anything!
Hanging Your Pew Bow
Depending on the type of pews that your church has, you will need some plastic pew clips (can be purchased at any craft store), pipe cleaner, or other type of wire to hang your pew bows. Be sure to try it a variety of different ways to find out what works best for your wedding ceremony location and budget. What ended up working for us to to hot glue pipe cleaners to the back of the pew bow, which were then easily attached to the pew clip and hung on the side of the pew.
Like I’ve said before, this is probably not the most professional way to create a pew bow, but they looked great, and worked perfectly for our wedding ceremony. Let me know if you have any questions on the directions, I tried to be as descriptive as possible, but I know it can still be confusing. If you look at the previous article to this one, Should I Have Church Decorations, the picture in that article is of the finished product of our pew bows and decorating. If pew bows aren’t for you, and you want more ideas for pew decorations, then check out my other article called Pew Decoration Ideas.
Tags: how to make pew bows, make your own pew bows, pew bows
I spent so much time on our wedding planning and working on the reception and other details that I totally didn’t think of church decorations. It really only hit me about two weeks before the big day when one of the ladies on the church asked me what I was planning on doing for decorations, and when I would need help to start decorating the sanctuary. I was shocked that I hadn’t even thought of it myself, and didn’t really have an answer. At that point so close to our actual wedding day, with all the other stressful details I was working on and considering more important I found myself wondering, “Do I really need church decorations?” After much thought and kicking myself for forgetting such a major detail, I came to the conclusion that my church decorations should have been at the forefront of my mind, and that I had let so many other things get in the way, and I’ll tell you why.
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