Tag Archives: ribbon

Ribbon Wand Costing

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Back when I talked about ribbon wands, I said I’d do a post about the costing for them. Well, here’s’ that post!

I started with the test ribbon wand that I liked and wanted to replicate. First step was figuring out the ‘ingredients’.

  • a stick
  • 2 feet of 7/8″ ivory satin ribbon
  • 3 feet of 1/8″ apple satin ribbon
  • 3 feet of 5/16″ teal organza ribbon

I started with the ribbon, because I figure the stick part would be easy to find.  I decided I wanted to make 65 of these puppies, so I figured out how many yards I’d need of each. Can I take this moment to say that the metric system makes so much more sense to me than 3 feet to a yard and 12 inches to a foot? I like my nice round multiples of 10 and 100. But, the ribbon was labeled in inches/yards so I went with that. Metric rant over, thank you. :)

I’ll need 65 yards each of apple green and teal, and 44 yards of ivory.

Obviously, I’d bought some ribbon already, so I pulled out my Michaels receipts to see how much it would cost to just buy the ribbon there.

  • Ivory: I had this in my ribbon stash from forever ago, so no receipt. Oops!
  • Apple Green: $0.59 per roll, each roll has 10 yards. I’d need 7 rolls (’cause you can’t buy a half roll!)  so total cost = $4.19. Not bad!
  • Teal: $2.99 per roll, each roll has 3 yards. I’d need 22 rolls, so total cost = $65.78 WHAT?!

My cost was already up to $70 and that doesn’t include the widest ribbon and the sticks? Uh oh! So then, I turned to my trusty friend, the interwebs. I decided that there must be somewhere online that I could buy ribbon way cheaper. I started searching, and ran into a roadblock: I found lots of places selling cheap ribbon, but almost nowhere that was selling all the kinds I wanted in the right colours. I didn’t want to have to pay shipping twice, so I knew I’d have to find somewhere that sold it all. The one (one!) place I found everything I wanted was crafta.com.

  • Ivory: $6.39 for 100 yards
  • Teal: $1.59 for 25 yards = $4.77 for 75 yards
  • Apple: $3.19 for 100 yards
  • Total ribbon cost = $14.35 + shipping

I was a little spooked by the colour of their ‘Apple Guava’ satin ribbon though. On my monitor, it looked like it could be the right colour, or it could be neon badness. It bothered me enough that I decided to buy that ribbon at Michaels, as the difference would only be about $1, or negligible if I waited for a sale.

I happily put 4 rolls of the teal (why not get extra, at that price?) and one roll of ivory in my cart, and went to check out. That is when I found out about the $50 minimum order and $5 handling fee for international orders. Argh! I checked through the website, added some apple green grosgrain ribbon to my cart. Added back the thin green ribbon I was going to buy at Michaels. Still nowhere near $50. I sent them an email, asking if they could make an exception. I never heard back.

I really wanted these particular ribbons, and my search was turning up fruitless elsewhere. I complained in a forum, and someone contacted me and said that if I wanted, I could get the order shipped to her house in Texas, and she could ship it to me! I waited another day to see if I heard back from Crafta, and when I didn’t, I went ahead and ordered, putting the shipping address as my new online friend’s house. :)

Here is how the ribbon costs worked out:

  • Ivory & teal: $12.75
  • Shipping from Crafta to Texas: $7.25
  • Shipping from Texas to me: $9
  • Green from Michaels: $4.40 (including tax)
  • Ribbon Total: $33.40

The sticks for the test ones were pre-cut lengths of dowel sold in packages of 20 from Michaels. (They were in the same aisle as the felt and kiddie stuff.) I figured that pre-cut, pre-sanded must be the expensive way to buy them, so I checked out the prices at Home Depot, and in the woodwork section of Michaels, where they sell longer lengths. It turned out that everything so close in price that it made sense to buy the pre-packaged stuff and not worry about cutting and sanding! The dowels are 3/16″ round, and 12″ long.

I waited for a sale and ended up getting 4 packages (80 dowels) for $13.50, bringing the total cost of the project to $46.90.

Cheaper than some bubble options I’ve seen / not as cheap as rice, but worth it for the lack of clean-up!

I suppose that cost doesn’t include glue gun and glue sticks, but I’ve had my glue gun since I was 10, and a ginormous package of glue sticks for it too, so I regard those as free. Same goes for the inkpad and stamp for the ivory ribbon. Cinnamon Buns and I are also both happy with the sticks being unfinished wood, so no paint or varnish costs either.

Do you have a favourite, and cheap, online craft supply store? Please share!

Fun With Candles

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Most weddings use ribbon in some way, shape, or form. A lot of ribbon that you buy at craft stores for your wedding DIY is probably polyester or nylon. That might not sound as romantic as ‘silk’ or ‘linen’, but it gives us a great advantge – not having to hem it!

Now, there are substances out there like Fray Check (TM) that you can use on most fabrics. It’s a little like clear, very liquidy glue that you dab on what you’ve cut, and it seals the ends in. I find it tends to leave a bit of a mark. Granted, I generally use it on cotton t-shirts, so maybe it would work fine for polyester ribbon. But the other way of sealing man-made ribbon is way more fun. You get to play with fire!

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A cut piece of polyester grosgrain ribbon. Left to its own devices, especially if it gets waved enthusiastically on the end of a ribbon wand, it would get fuzzy. The thread would pull out and it would look messy and stringy. Now if I was making things the day before the wedding, I probably wouldn’t bother with this step, but as I’m making them months and months in advance, storing them, changing where they’re stored as I run out of space, unpacking them to look at them and show to people… they’re going to get some wear and tear. This is where my friend the candle comes in.

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You don’t want to stick the ribbon in the flame, you just want to get it close enough to the heat that the very end melts a little. If you get too close, it all starts melting. Melt the ribbon  just enough to seal the end, and wait a few seconds before you touch it. It will stick to your fingers if you don’t.

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In this photo, you can see the melted bead at the end of the ribbon. No more pull-outy threads!

Burning fabric is a little but fun, but also informative. Have some fabric, but you don’t know what the fibre is? Do a burn test! We learned about this in costume class in school, and I remember thinking it was really cool then. But be careful when testing! Don’t burn down your house just trying to figure out if that thrift-store scarf is silk or not. :)

I didn’t use this grosgrain in my ribbon wands, but I spent a facinating evening watching the municipal election and measuring/cutting/melting all the green satin ribbon I need for the wands. I’m still waiting for the teal and ivory stuff I ordered to arrive. The grosgrain I was just playing with, but I ended up with some of these:

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I love it, but don’t know what to do with it. Clips for shoes? Clips for hair? Boutonnieres? Stick them on stems and make a bouquet? Centrepieces? Scatter them wildly over the tables?

Tie a Printed Ribbon Round the….

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…. 3/16″ dowel?

Our venue doesn’t have any no-throw rules. We could get our guests to pelt us with anything we want (except maybe puppies. Definitely not puppies). The thing is, I imagine this happening when we’re walking back down the aisle (is that when this usually happens? I’ve been to 3 weddings in my life!) after being pronounced husband and wife. We walk down the aisle, guests throw things from their seats. I have seen photos of the throwing of stuff outside on church steps…. what are the logistics on that? Couple recesses, hides somewhere, guests go outside, then the newlyweds leave for realsies?

Anyway, logistics aside, we could have stuff thrown if we want. But, our ceremony area will become the dancefloor later in the night, and home of the photobooth. Our day-of coordinator is going to have 65+ chairs to rearrange, I don’t want to add sweeping to that. It’s a big room! So I’ve been trying to think of other options. I’m not a bubble fan – they pop on my glasses and leave blurry marks. I like the idea of flags that say ‘Yay!’ or something like it, but I’m currently obsessed with ribbon wands!

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So yes. Clean? Check. Adorable? Check. Feeds my need to buy ribbon? Check. Production line-able? Check!

I’d brought the idea up with Cinnamon Buns, just to get it in our brain pans, but we hadn’t had a conversation about just ribbon wands before I made some. :) I bought some wedding-coloured ribbon at Michaels because it was on sale the other day. I’ve made some flowers out of it (tutorial to come!) and today I tried the ribbon wands.

First, I thought about personalizing them. I made a little wedding colour palette in Photoshop the other day, so here it is for a reminder of our wedding colours:

Our Wedding Colours

I’ve looked, but I haven’t yet found text-print ribbon that doesn’t say “Happy Birthday” or “I’m Two!” or “Just Married” in colours that don’t go. And I don’t really want message text, I just want the ribbons to look like they were made out of an antique book. Actual book pages don’t have the right flowyness, they’d rip, and most books aren’t 2′ long! So I’ll just have to make my own! I grabbed one of my Text Style II stamps from Paper Trey Ink (I think this will be my most-used wedding investment!) and went to work on some 7/8″ satin ribbon I had lying around.

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The top ribbon was stamped with Memento Ink, the bottom with StazOn. No, the top of the photo is not blurry, it’s the ink bleeding on the ribbon! This is why it’s good to have a few different inks lying around – Memento was right for the napkins, but really blurs on the ribbon. You don’t get a perfect impression stamping on fabric, but I’m not going for readablity on this, just the essence of book-y.

I tried one wand with just knots and thin ribbon:

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5/16″ green grosgrain, 5/16″ sheer teal with borders, 1/8″ green satin. Not bad, but I didn’t use any glue, so the ribbons are apt to slide down the dowel. The grosgrain isn’t as floaty as the others.

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Teal 7/8″ grosgrain, 2 strands of 1/8″ green satin. For this one I used double-sided tape. I put some on one end of teal ribbon, then stuck the dowel to it. I put another strip on the ribbon, stuck the 2 small ribbons to it, then rolled it up. This way the raw ends of the ribbons are hidden under the teal. The green ones pop up, a little like antennae. All the streamers are between 18-24 inches. This one is fun, and weirdly enough the wider grosgrain has better flap-ability than the thinner green stuff.

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7/8″ satin, 1/8″ satin, 5/16″ sheer bordered ribbon. For this one, I used 24″ of my hand-stamped ribbon, and attached everything the same way as the last wand, only I used the glue gun instead of double-sided tape. The satin ribbon flows much nicer than the grosgrain. I love the look of this one! Stamping the ribbon would be the perfect tedious task for TV-watching or otherwise vegging out. Maybe I could even get my un-listened-to podcast count down to under 50! It’d be a lot of stamping: 2 feet x 65 guests = 130 feet! The stamp is 4.5″ long, so….347 individual impressions?

Once I made these samples, Cinnamon Buns and I were able to have a good conversation about them. Instead of waving my hands, I could wave these around! We may or may not have had a sword fight with them. :) I was worried he might think they were too ‘girly’ but he thought they were fun and unique! We decided we like the one with 5 ribbons – he thought the stamped ribbon was pretty cool. Now I just have to do some research and see if I can get the ribbon cheaper somewhere else. I’ll do another post on costing for them, and a full pic-by-pic tutorial soon!

Here’s a shot of them all standing up in my button jar:

Want the look, but don’t want to DIY? Here’s a great Etsy store!

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