How to Store Hair Bows So They Keep Their Shape

Last month a customer sent me a photo of a double bow she had bought in August. One loop stood tall and the other had gone soft and flat on one side, like a pillow someone had been sitting on. She wanted to know if it was a fault in the stitching. It wasn’t. She had been keeping it in the zip pocket of her handbag, under a water bottle and a bunch of keys, for about four months. The bow had simply been told, every single day, to be a different shape.

That is really all storage is. Fabric holds whatever position you leave it in the longest. Satin especially. I sew everything here in Visakhapatnam in small batches, and the humidity here means fabric is always a little relaxed, a little willing to take a new shape. Which is lovely when I am pressing loops on the ironing board and awful when your bow has spent a season folded in half.

The three things that actually ruin a bow

After four years of packing orders and handling returns, I can tell you the damage almost always comes from one of these:

• Pressure. Weight sitting on the loops for hours. Handbags, drawers packed too full, a stack of bows piled on each other.
• Heat plus damp. A bow that goes into a closed box slightly damp after a hot day will come out with a permanent crease and sometimes a faint smell.
• Tangling. Clips catching on other clips, elastic wrapping around tails. The pull distorts the knot at the centre, which is the one part you cannot re-press back into shape.

What I do with my own

I keep a shallow cardboard box, roughly the size of a chapati tin, lined with a plain cotton cloth. Bows go in loop side up, single layer, never stacked. That is it. No special organiser, nothing bought. The rule is one layer and nothing on top.

Storing bows and clips

Structured bows like the Golden Glaze Double Bow need air around them. If you have a drawer, use a divider or a small open box inside it so nothing rolls on top. If you hang your bows on a ribbon strip on the wall, clip them by the alligator clip and let the loops face outward, not pressed against the wall.

For travel, I wrap one bow in a sheet of tissue, loosely, then place it inside a hard container. A small steel tiffin box works better than any pouch. A soft pouch does nothing against a laptop bag.

Reviving a flattened loop

This works and takes two minutes. Hold the bow about twenty centimetres above the spout of a kettle that has just boiled, loops facing the steam, for around ten seconds. Do not let it get wet. Then use your fingers to open each loop from the inside, press the fold line lightly with your thumbnail, and set it down loop side up to cool for ten minutes. The cooling is the part people skip, and the cooling is what sets the shape.

Scrunchies are a different problem

Scrunchies do not lose shape from pressure, they lose it from stretch. Leaving one wrapped around a doorknob or a hairbrush handle for weeks tires out the elastic. I keep mine on a length of cotton cord tied between two hooks, relaxed, not pulled taut.

Satin ones like the Black Satin Scrunchie and the Zebra Luxe Satin Scrunchie should stay away from anything with velcro or rough zips, since satin snags and a pulled thread cannot be repaired invisibly. Ruffled ones such as the Aurora Ruffle Scrunchie want the same treatment as bows, one layer, nothing on top, so the ruffle stays standing.

Washing, briefly

Hand wash in cool water with a drop of mild shampoo. Squeeze, never wring. Lay flat on a towel out of the sun and reshape while damp. Most fading I see comes from sunlight, not washing.

One last thing. If a fabric you love is listed as low stock, it usually means I have a metre or less left on the roll and cannot reorder it. Storing that one properly is the only way to keep it.