Friday, September 8, 2017

Making Cockade Ribbons

This past weekend we had a killer heatwave come through the Bay Area that broke record temperatures.  Our normally mild climate town was seeing temperatures of 106, and we don't have air conditioning in this house.

It was so hot, I didn't want to sew or knit, but I wanted to be crafty, so I thought to pull out some grosgrain ribbon and do some ribbon crafting.

A few years ago, my Viking took a cockade making class with Candace King who wrote a wonderful book called, The Artful Ribbon. I've used her book to make flowered ribbons as trim for various costumes, but I'd never really tried my hand at making ribbon cockades. It was a good a time as any to learn.

My VIking gave me a few basics. I grabbed a compass and rule to draw out a sectioned circle, started folding ribbon to the lines, pinning them into place, and eventually sewing all of it down onto a piece of buckrum. My first attempt looked pretty and I was emboldened by my success.

 

However, my second and third attempts didn't end so well. I had a bit of a problem getting the folds to look correct and it fell apart as I was trying to sew it together.


Eventually, I managed to make one that looked half-way decent.

I layered these two pieces together onto the buckrum (the black backing fabric) and took a random pendant I had in my beading box to finish off the project. I'm probably going to turn this piece into a hair fastener.  


I felt pretty good about this piece, so I decided to try my hand at a different type of cockade. Unfortunately, I couldn't find much instruction on how to make this particular one, so I spent some time playing origami with ribbon until I "un-invented" the technique.

This particular cockade looks pretty good in either direction. It reminded me of a sea star or anenome.

I had this really cute button that matched the ribbon color and was marine-life themed, so I decided to turn this into a wearable pin.


I really enjoyed making them.  It was a bit of effort to fold and pin them in place, but the process was satisfying in general. I have a lot of grosgrain ribbon from knitting, and will most likely be making more in the near future for a variety of purposes.

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