Sequined Bowtie For a Cat

This past weekend I threw an Anniversary Party celebrating my first year in Portland. It was important to me that my cat, Face, outdressed all my guests, and thus I had to make him a sequined bowtie.

Ideally the sequins would have been silver or black to match his coat, but red was my only option; a little on the nose, but for a cat in a sequined bowtie who’d really criticize?

Here’s an approximate tutorial on how I did it (I really don’t feel like doing it again, plus it’s so easy I’m sure you could extrapolate):

Materials

• Felt the color of your bowtie
• A strip of sequin the color of your bowtie
• A strip of elastic the color of your cat’s coat
• Glue Gun
• Scissors
• Seam Ripper (optional; you can use scissors)

Procedure

Cut two identical triangles of felt. Make them smaller than you think the final product should be, as the sequins will add bulk. My cat weighs 12 pounds and here are his bowtie pieces to scale.

Overlap and glue the two triangles together such that you get a symmetrical bowtie shape with parallel outer edges. Don’t make me get all geometrical. Do a search for “bowtie shape.” Make it look like that.

(This is where I used the seam ripper) Starting at the outer edge of one triangle, drape and secure a length of sequin with a little bit of hot glue. What I did was drape a length, glue, drape another length, glue…working your way to the inside. I stopped short of the second triangle piece.

You can see here that I cut an excess length of sequin and stripped the ends. I glued the bare ends to the back of the bowtie. This keeps the sequin from unraveling. The reason I did it this way was because to wrap the sequin to the other side would make the bowtie too heavy. You only want sequin on one side of your bowtie.

Repeat step (3), mirroring your work on the other side. When you get to the point where the triangles overlap, use individual sequins to keep your work neat.

Measure a length of elastic comfortably around your cat’s neck. Glue one end of the elastic at the center of the bowtie and glue the other end flat against that, making sure not to twist your elastic. This will form a collar.

Please don’t let your cat wear this accessory unsupervised. He (or she?) may get the elastic caught in his mouth, ingest some sequins, or it might agitate him. I have a perfect, well-behaved cat who was a good sport, but this may not be right for your pet. Please use common sense.