Weddingbee Blog

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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 Mr. CB, 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:

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.

The top ribbon was stamped with Memento Ink, the bottom with StazOn. No, the top of the photo is not blurry, it’s 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 readability on this, just the essence of book-y.

I tried one wand with just knots and thin ribbon:

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 are.

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, the rolled it up. This way the raw ends of all the ribbons are hidden under the teal ribbon. The green ones pop up, a little like antennae. All the streamers are between 18-24 inches. This is fun, and weirdly enough, the wider grosgrain has better flap-ability than the thinner green stuff.

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 that would make…347 individual impressions?

Once I made these samples, Mr. CB 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!  I’ll do a cost breakdown post on these soon!

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

Wands in my button jar

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