A Tutorial on Tying your Waist Ties for Lolita by Yourself
Full, perky, and symmetrical bows are essential to lolita. Sure you’ve watched videos on how to tie them, I know you know how to do it. Every bow you tie comes out perfectly. But when it comes to actually tying your waist ties behind your back before you go out... You’re stuck.
A lot of people don’t know how to a nice bow. Unless you live with a sailor, chances are you’re not going to be able to teach your roommate/partner/parents to tie a nice one for you because beyond tying their shoes, they just don’t really give a damn.
Fortunately most waist ties come unattached to the dress, which means you don’t need to find a sailor to tie your waist ties. You can do it yourself!
Here’s what you need:
Two waist ties
A hanger
A flat surface
Clip the waist ties at the button holes with the hanger. Unfortunately the distance you’ll need them to be apart is different for every dress, so you might have to finaggle this a few times before you get it right. You can try measuring the distance between where the buttons fall on your waist with a tape measure, but I’ve never had much luck with doing that.
Cross the waist ties and tuck the one on top under the bottom one, but don’t flip it! It’s more like tying string around a parcel than making a knot. If you were to flip it, the design wouldn’t show on a one sided tie, or the points at the ends would be pointing opposite ways!
Make a bunny ear with the tie that ends up underneath. Here this would be the tie clipped to the left. (This is where I realized the bow would be upside down on the hanger. It doesn’t really matter, though. You can do it either way, just change around the ties on the clips.)
When you’ve made your bunny ear, tuck it up parallel to the waist length of the ties. Spin the top waist tie around (Again, don’t flip it!), and wrap it around your bunny ear.
Make a bunny ear with the top waist tie, spin it 90° and tuck it through the loop!
Tighten it by pulling on the back sides of the bunny ears. Start with the one you wrapped around, because that wrapped length needs to be pulled in to the bow.
Take the bow off the hanger to make final adjustments. Make sure the bow is centered on the tie!
All done! Put your dress on and button the bow onto it.
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