Cockades!

Earlier this year, I made myself a new hat (it will be blogged), and I wanted to put a nice cockade on it. So, I looked for suitable ribbons, and couldn’t find any. I found some ribbon that looked passable, but the colours I wanted weren’t available, so I set up the website to notify me, and kept working on the hat.

Eventually the hat was done, the ribbon was still not available, so I decorated the hat with fake flowers from my stash, and started wearing it.

And that’s when I got notified that the ribbon was back in stock.

By the time the ribbon arrived, I had decided that the hat looked better with the flowers, and project cockade was put on hold, possibly for a future hat.

And then June came, and what could be a better time than that for a project based on flag colours?

As I feared, the ribbon I got wasn’t the best: it was a bit too stiff and plasticy, and not really usable for many other things. It did however work well enough for a cockade, and I decided it was a good chance to try different methods and designs, and then make another one to take pictures and publish step-by-step instructions.

And that’s the perfect recipe to find oneself surrounded by a somewhat unreasonable number of very similar cockades, I guess.

I looked around for instructions, and the ones that gave a result that was closer to my mental idea of a cockade were the ones by American Duchess, so on my first attempt I tried to follow those.

I didn’t have a cork board with a hole, so it was a bit fiddly, and the result was passable, but could have been better. Meanwhile I saw a forum post commenting on the above tutorial and that gave me ideas for a procedure more suitable to the tools I had.

The second cockade I made was indeed more satisfactory, and I also started to experiment with making a center piece with ribbons, to cut down on the types of materials needed.

On this one I also tried to add a pin backing, so that I could write instructions on how to do it in what I believe is a more stable way than simply adding it to the felt backing at the end.

I’m not sure whether the other ones will be tacked to a hat, and thus won’t require pins at all, or if I’ll just put them on some dress with pins hidden under the ribbon layers.

And then I was ready to make a third cockade, taking step by step pictures for my website, and I planned to start on it the next morning.

Trenord had different ideas.

Thanks to the combination of independent but complete disruptions on two nearby train lines, I spent the morning driving a couple of people to the nearest station that was still being served by trains, and then back home less than 10 minutes before I had to start working, which if you ask¹ me was pretty homophobic of the train company.

There was way less traffic than I expected, and I did enjoy the drive ², but for various reasons it meant a significant delay for this post.

Anyway, less than a week later than I had planned, halfway in June I managed to publish step by step instructions on my website, but I wasn’t done with the project yet.

Beside the fact that I still needed to finish sewing the backing felt to the cockades I had done, I also had a few ideas for more centrepieces made of ribbon I wanted to try.

And this means that I moved on to another project that was already in progress (this one will also be blogged).

After I’ve finished that one, at the very end of June I quickly made the last two centrepieces, taking pictures for the instructions, and in the next few days I also finished the cockades.

This time, instead of plain pleats I tried to use box pleats, and I quite like the look they give, so if in the future I’ll have a need for more cockades I may use again this pleating pattern.

For the last cockade I wanted to try two things: putting a pin in the middle as a centrepiece, and gathering the ribbons.

For the pin, I found that the only one I had that had a colour scheme compatible with the ribbons I had was one with the penguin from linux.it, which had a black background, so I put black ribbon on the outside and white next to it for contrast.

And gathering was done with a whipped gather with ribbons that were one and a half times the outer circumference of their slot, and looks decent enough, but I think I prefer the look of pleated cockades a lot. Maybe it would look better with a softer ribbon.

Anyway, I think this is plenty of cockades for the time being, unless I get tempted by buying more colours of ribbon to make different ones. But I’m not making an online purchase just for those. I am not.