Fancy Fringe

I was going to do something a little different today, but ran out of time, so instead I will share with you my obsession with fancy trims. The pillows you see in this picture are all from my bed. A few years ago, when I still sewed and did not stamp, I absolutely fell in love with this dragonfly fabric and wanted to sew a whole bedding ensemble with it.

Fortunately, around the same time, we happened to find a comforter, dust ruffle and shams in the same color family with the same luxurious feel (you can see the comforter underneath the pillows) so I didn't have to put those together myself. However, I still wanted to use the dragonfly fabric so I made some window treatments with them and sewed some accent pillow cases. I was, and to this day am, very proud of these. I'm not an expert seamstress by any stretch, and these were not exactly simple pillows. Add to that the heavy weight of the fabric and the trim, and the darned things pretty much killed my sewing machine and me.

But I think you can tell from these pillows that I'm a trim fanatic. Rope trim, fringes or tassels -- it doesn't matter. I love it all! So you can imagine how excited I was Sunday when I figured out how to add fringe to my pillow CASE card! And just in case some of you are interested and as visual as I am, I created a tutorial to show you how you can add fringe to your cards as well.

You start with a simple length of grosgrain ribbon. I used the narrow grosgrain, but you could use the wide grosgrain as well if you needed a longer fringe.

You may want to cut the length of the ribbon to the length of the perimeter of the image you want the fringe around, plus another 1/2 inch.

You then want to snip away the "binding" on one of the edges of the ribbon. You can see about 1/2 inch of the binding snipped away in this photo. Keep going until all the binding is gone, cutting as closely as possible right to the edge of the binding (so that the fringe is the same length all around).

After the binding edge is cut away, you can use your fingers to pull off the long lengths of fibers. You can throw these fibers away or use them on another project by turning them into a tassel or tying a knot in them or whatever else you can think of.

This is what your ribbon will look like after the long strands are pulled off. Pretty cute, but lacking in color.

To color my fringe I just used my stampin' write markers. I started with the lighter color and used the brush tip to dye the fringe.
I then used the writing tip of my darker color to dye some of the fringe, making sure some lighter color showed through.
After the fringe dried (it's a pretty quick drying process) I used SNAIL to attach it to the very edge of the image, making sure that the other binding edge was hidden underneath the card stock.

And this is what it looked like on my pillow "case" card. Please note that to get the right look for all corners, I actually started attaching my fringe in the center of one of the sides instead of in one of the corners. I think it turned out pretty cool. If I had to do it over again, though, for this pillow I might make 2 or 3 strips of fringe and layer them one on top of another. I think that would have made the "pillow" look even more realistic.

So now you know how to make your own fringe. How many other uses can you think of for this technique?