Eco friendly Handmade Rakhi making tutorial for Rakhsabandhan

Make this rakshabandhan unique & special with Eco-Friendly Handmade Rakhi made from fabric. If you are like me and do not enjoy store bought rakhis, this tutorial is for you.

Hello peeps! We are at the much awaited longest weekend of 2019 and thanks to Independence day in the middle, we are going to have an even shorter week! Well so  Rakhsabandhan is hardly 5 days away  and although we literally do not celebrate Rakshabandhan festival, it has become such an integral part of our culture that it is more of a cultural festival than religious. We buy rakhis every year for Grace to get to school where they celebrate rakshabandhan.

This year I thought we should make something that is eco friendly and not the usual plastic ones. So we made these really pretty and yet simple fabric rakhis that are not only eco-friendly & sustainable but also long lasting. Ready for this fun activity over the weekend?

Materials required to make ecofriendly handmade rakhi : 

• Fabric
• Needle & thread
• Ribbon/twine
• Pompom
• Hot glue

How to make Eco Friendly handmade Rakhi :  

I had some satin fabric that was from the butterfly costume I made for Grace ( follow me on Instagram to see more of those “butterfly” stories that don’t make it to my blog) and I used them for this DIY handmade rakhi. You can use old fabrics from dresses, sarees etc which has pretty patterns or zaris for making these handmade rakhi.

Cut them out into circle of around 4 inches diameter so that you end up with around 2 inch diameter rakhi.

Start by stitching the edges of the circle by making a small fold inwards ( toward the wrong side of fabric) and keep doing running stitch. Its important that you do a simple running stitch so that you can pull the thread to gather the fabric in your next step.

You might want to fold over the first fold like in the photo below to make a circular shape.

This is how your fabric will look once you are finished stitching the edges.

Once you reach the end, remove the needle and pull the thread tightly to gather the stitched part of fabric to form a small bag.

Make a knot in the thread and then flatten the bag shape to form this flower sort of shape. If you want you can make a stitch from center to backside fabric to make they stay put but it still stays put together anyways. On a lighter note, you know from where I got this handmade rakhi idea? When I was in school we had this class called SUPW (socially useful productive work) and this was something I learnt during that class. This was however a part of an embroidery work where these small bubbles went on to become flowers on tree branches but I think they also look good as rakhis right?

I would’ve in normal case added some sequins and beads etc to embellish but remember this is an eco-friendly handmade rakhi so I took out a small little pompom and added it at the center.

Also attached a matching satin ribbon with hot glue as the string for the handmade rakhi.

 

This was such a simple DIY handmade rakhi. Do you prefer making rakhi for rakhsabandhan or do you buy rakhi? Also I would love to hear how you guys celebrate rakhi as for us, its pretty much just limited to rakhis. So do let us know you rakhi stories and we would love to know.

We will be coming up with more last minute DIY handamde rakhi ideas , mostly that are easy peasy to make, so stay tuned 🙂

xoxo 

Angela