Wedding Blog

How’d you spend your Labor Day? I spent mine (or at least a small part of it) making a 3rd (and final) sash. See, on Monday morning, I tried on my dress to make sure my undergarments were fitting properly with it. They were, but I saw something else — something kind of bad: my sash was entirely the wrong color.

It was lime, and my shoes are “bamboo”. That’s somewhere between light green and grass green, but it’s definitely not lime. It was a very noticeable color difference. Too much of a difference to write off as an “almost”. It wasn’t even in the ballpark.

How did I not notice this before?

Crap.

With little time remaining until our wedding day, I decided that I needed a new sash. I didn’t want to take any chances, so I slipped in to my wedding day shoes and out the door I went. Thankfully, I easily found some better-matching ribbon at Micheals. It was wider too (which I’d originally wanted). Sweeeeeeet. I bought it, along with some more beads (since it’s a wider ribbon).

I apologize in advance for the bad photo: I had poor lighting, but no other opportunity to correct it. Here, you can somewhat see the color difference (and widths) between the two ribbons.

There isn’t a big difference, no, but in “real life”, the new ribbon is quite a bit less neon and yellowy in comparison with the old ribbon.

I cut an adequate length of the new ribbon (about 2 yards), and was unpleasantly surprised to find that this ribbon was wired! The packaging didn’t say anything about it being wired. But it was — most definitely — wired. I really did not want to deal with a wired sash. Thankfully, the wire wasn’t that hard to remove: I just grabbed the wired ends of it and cinch/pull/cinch/pulled it until the wires were out:

Then, I melted the edges to prevent fraying. I had used clear nail polish to seal the edges of the first ribbon sash. And while that had worked OK, it didn’t work that well, so I decided to try melting the edges instead. [Also, I was too lazy to go all the way upstairs to get the nail polish; I had matches right within reach. Haha.]

The key to melting a ribbon’s edge is to keep the fire a reasonable distance from the ribbon. If you get it too close, the edge will turn black and/or you’ll actually set the ribbon on fire. I found that holding the edge a little under a half-inch from the match did the trick: I managed to melt the edge of the ribbon without burning my house down. If you’re trying this for the first time, I recommend practicing a few times first with a scrap. Oh, and this won’t work if your fabric is cotton, linen, or otherwise organically-based. My ribbon only melted because its synthetic makeup contains plastics (e.g. Nylon).

When the ribbon was properly melted, I started beading once again. I had to cut the beads from the first ribbon sash so that I would have enough for this new one. Here they all are (along with the new beads I bought to help make up for the change in ribbon-width).

After a bit of sewing, I had this!

Crisis averted. You won’t have to wait long to see it in action on our wedding day!

Has necessity forced you in to tackling any last-minute wedding projects?