Monday, June 20, 2005

How to make silk bias cut ribbons

I have this great book that I bought back when I thought I wanted to do alot of silk embroidery called the New Ribbon Embroidery by Victoria Adams Brown. She tells how to cut the silk ribbon. I had a yard of pdf silk habatoi that I bought at Houston last year. First cuts I made were using the 45 degree angle on the long ruler. I used the small Olfa Cutter for it. My antique cutter which must be more than 20 years old!

The ribbons were cut on the bias to avoid fraying. Once the silk got to long for the ruler I folded up the silk like I would cotton for bias...very carefully though. And kept cutting. You can get an amazing pile of ribbon from one yard of silk. The author did recommend crepe but since the habotai had aged long enough we cut it up instead! Worked great! This book has at least 12 pages on dyeing and painting silk ribbons.

Next time we are going to use dye paint instead of fabric paint(Lumiere and Dye-na-flow) so we can improve the hand...make it less stiff...but the colors are lovely and we three really had a good time doing it.

Get out of our way Artemis ribbons...here come some SC peaches ribbon!:>

4 comments:

Liz Plummer said...

These are yummy ... I must have a go! I would never have guessed about cutting them on the bias stopping them fraying.

Karoda said...

BEAUTIFUL! Do you sell them?

lizzieb said...

yes, it is very important to let the silk age appropriately.
Lots of fun colors...I like dyed silk bias also...way too much fun!

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