Crafting, in general, is a very satisfying process. It can be healing both for the heart and mind. But what can make us feel even better is making something for our loved ones. And our dogs certainly fit into that category!

In this article, we’ll show you how to make a dog collar on your own.

DIY How to Make a Dog Collar for Your Dog

Necessary Material

For this project we’ll need:

• A piece of fabric of our choice
• Nylon webbing
• 1 contoured side release buckle
• 1 triglide slide
• 1 D ring
• Sewing machine
• Iron
• Scissors
• Measuring tape or a longer ruler
• Spray starch

Before we start, we must first measure the circumference of our dog’s neck by using a measuring tape. If you have an old collar, you can use it instead of measuring tape to determine the right length for the webbing and fabric. Besides that, our D ring, buckle, and triglide have to match the width of the nylon webbing.

Step 1: The Cutting

After we’ve determined the needed length, we proceed to cut the webbing, which is the base of our collar. Since we don’t want it to start unraveling, we can use heat (for example, from a cigarette lighter) to melt the edges and prevent it.

When cutting the fabric, we need to have in mind that it has to cover both sides of the webbing.

Step 2: The Sewing

Here comes the trickiest part if you’re not used to working on a sewing machine.

Before we start sewing, we can spray some starch on our fabric and iron it to get rid of all the wrinkles and have more accurate stitches. It is completely optional, so if you don’t have any spray starch, ironing the cloth should work just fine.

After this, we proceed to sewing. Since we’ll be making a tube to slide our webbing through, the loop needs to be wide enough. And we shouldn’t forget to sew the fabric inside out so we’ll be able to hide the stitching later on!

After we’ve sewn it, we can use a chopstick (anything long and thin will do) to turn the fabric inside again before we insert the webbing. The collar will look the best if the stitch is aligned right against the edge of the webbing. Once again, we can do the optional starching step to remove the wrinkles and fixate the seam.

Now we proceed to sew the webbing and fabric together with seams on both sides of the collar. They need to be close to the edge, but not as close to miss the webbing.

Step 3: Adding Everything Else

In this step, the first thing we do is put on the triglide by weaving the collar through it. We should leave an inch on one side to loop under the triglide, which we then stitch on, making it the end of the collar.

After this, we add our buckle. We slide the male end of it so that the prongs are facing the triglide and weave the webbing back through the triglide, which finishes one end of the collar.

Then we slide the D ring.

The last step is putting on the female end of the slide buckle on the other side of the collar. If  the perimeter is right when the collar is closed — we’re done!