Ribbon Applique

 From a practice piece, a rose in multi-colored satin ribbon

My two-day national class, Winding Roads, is finished and ready to pilot.  The pilot class takes place next Saturday and Sunday in Los Alamos, courtesy of Pajarito Chapter and Carole Rinard.

Bailadora, from a photo of a dancer at Las Golandrinas.  The photo was printed onto fabric, applied to upholstery fabric and then ribbon appliqued.

It is a long, hard road to get a class this far.  First coming up with an idea and project unique enough to catch the eye of a national selection committee.  In the case of Winding Roads, I had been working in the area of ribbon appliqué for several years before I got a clue that I should be teaching the stuff.  My first inspiration was an old spool of rayon ribbon in a light blue.  The spool looked like it was from the fifties or sixties.  The ribbon was ½” wide and was a utilitarian ribbon rather than a decorative one.

Ribbon applique in black and white with lace added and a drawn and painted paper background

I was working at that time on upholstery fabrics that I painted and embroidered making them into scrolls that could be unwound and hung on a wall.  I only made three before I started appliquéing the blue rayon ribbon onto an odd piece of upholstery fabric left over from one of the scrolls.  (By the way, I gave one scroll Espiritu away; sold one named Mi Alma; and a third I eventually cut up and used for other projects.)  Hydrangeas were the perfect flower for the rayon ribbon--right color, right texture.  And voila! Hydrangea Garden was born.  Wanda Anderson bought it much before I could show it around to too many people.

But it was in the appliquéing of Hydrangea Garden that the winding roads appliqué technique was invented.  And it was on this technique plus a few others that I based my other ribbon appliqué pieces more than seven years later.

Another experiment in ribbon applique on a painted background with some paper ribbon

Since I struggled and experimented with ribbon appliqué on my own without research into other people’s work, I reference very few sources.  In the late eighties I worked for YLI Corp. while they were still in Provo, UT and I was in Sandy UT, just north on I-15 from them.  I wrote some instructions for silk ribbon embroidery (I am not sure they were ever published), did some teaching/demoing for them, and generally tried out their threads and ribbons.  So I was influenced by that.  The ribbons I use now are much less expensive and much larger than the delicate jewel-toned silk ribbons.  So the same techniques by and large do not work as well if at all.  For instance, French knots in silk ribbon are pretty little things that one can easily sprinkle around the ground fabric.  But just try getting an inch-wide grosgrain to French knot in any meaningful way--torn ground fabric is a very real possibility.

Winding Roads, the national class to be taught at EGA National Seminar in September, 2011

I started out this entry by explaining the trials and tribulations of getting a class ready for its national debut and quickly devolved into writing something else.  Well, maybe sometime I will explain the eighteen month process of a getting national class from the grain of an idea, through the proposal process, through the writing, etc.  Maybe.  Someday.