From middle school to high school to college, bows are not only popular with cheerleaders of all ages, they are an essential part of their uniform.
At the beginning of each season, most teams typically order a large number of bows that match their team colors and the theme of their major competitions.
Popular designs for these include a monogram, name, sports logo or favorite athletic team.
Here are three tips for creating sublimated cheer bows:
- Try searching Etsy for cheer bows for design ideas, which will show a huge variety of designs that incorporate team colors, logos, monograms, chevrons and photographs-some designs even include rhinestones and glitter.
- Traditional hand-made cheer bows unfortunately have limited design potential and require a lot of time and effort to produce. Using a dye-sublimation system, digital decorators can transfer gorgeous full-color designs, logos and photographs onto polyester grosgrain ribbon in minutes. Once the bow design has been created, you are ready for printing, pressing and then assembly.
- Matching an organization’s colors is absolutely critical. Since your monitor will never display accurate colors, I recommend printing and sublimating a color swatch chart. Once you have printed and sublimated the swatch chart to ribbon, you will need to obtain something from the organization that accurately represents the desired colors (a uniform or a Pantone reference number). You then hold the desired color up to your sublimated chart to find the correct match.
