I Have a New Personality, and It Is This Giant Bow I Sewed for Valentine's Day

It is soooooooo cute, right?!?

I'm genuinely obsessed with it.

I'm at least two months behind on the giant bow trend, and honestly probably more like six months, but it was the entirety of December during which everyone was showing off their giant Christmas bows on Tiktok that finally influenced me to covet a giant bow of my own.

I figured I could probably reverse engineer my own giant bow pattern by looking at all the million examples on social media, but then I was all, "Don't be a bad citizen, Self!", and purchased the pattern on etsy...

...and then proceeded to ignore all the pattern creator's helpful instructions for actually making the pattern and messed up a bunch of parts and cut the ribbon notches after the fact so I had to satin stitch the raw edges and forgot most of the edge stitching and tried to sub in stash fleece instead of batting but had to iron on interfacing anyway because fleece wasn't stiff enough, etc.

I did remember the quilting, at least!

I had so much trouble thanks to my own cussedness that I was worried I was going to hate the finished bow, but omg I am OBSESSED with it. I'm already mentally digging through my fabric stash to see what bow I'm going to replace this one with after Valentine's Day, and I've got a couple of ideas for custom fabric prints that I want my husband/in-house graphic designer to create for me that would make printed panels just the right size for these bows.

Spoiler alert: would a giant crime scene tape bow not be SO COOL?!?

Here's what else I'm currently working on that's not turning out quite right:

I'm disappointed with the yellow that I picked for my latest cross-stitched bookmark--it's too light! You can barely see it against the white! How do you figure out if your floss is going to have enough contrast with your fabric? Is this when you're supposed to switch your photo to black and white and compare the tones?

Hold on...

Huh! It kind of works, because both of the yellows barely show up, but the green seems super light, too, and I don't have a problem with the green actually, so I dunno.

Ah, well! Spam me with your floss-choosing strategies in the Comments!

As soon as I resign myself to my too-pale yellow pony and finish that cross-stitch bookmark, I think I want to start on my first BIG cross-stitch project.

Check out this cross-stitch pattern I found on the Antique Pattern Library website!

I'm completely in love with Sir Kittycat, and I can't wait to stitch him. Do you think I should stitch the white parts or the red parts?

I need to learn how to cross-stitch super fast, too, because the Antique Pattern Library also has horoscope figures, Aesop's fables, my boy Achilles, and Joan of Arc literally being burned at the stake, the latter of which is, of course, desperately sad but I want to make it anyway. Even though we're not religious, I've always considered Joan of Arc my older kid's patron saint, and I think it would make a morbid, but interesting, gift for her.

So, a giant crime scene tape bow for one kid and a cross-stitch of a woman being burned at the stake for another. I've already got so many ideas for Christmas!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!