As an American kid in the 1980s, I was very much exposed to the advertising for the Get In Shape Girl line of toys. Now, my Mom was an aerobics instructor, so most of that line of toys held no appeal for me.
But.
That ribbon wand.
So I bought it and I liked it, except for the fact that the ribbon was attached in a way that did not, most of the time, allow it to spin freely, so I'd have to stop playing and take a moment to untwist the whole thing. Which got annoying. I eventually left it at the grandparents' house for all my cousins to play with whenever they wanted. After dealing with the need to untwist it, I'm not sure they wanted to much, either.
About a month ago, though, I was suddenly seized with the idea of making a ribbon wand. A ribbon wand with a proper connector. A ribbon wand that would not twist into an unfun worm.
So I started poking the internet to try to find information about actual gymnastics ribbon wands and discovered that the ribbon parts are generally around 2" wide and 15'-20' long (doubled up about 3' on the end that attaches to the wand), on a 25" wand. Seeing pictures of the proper swivel hooks triggered a vague sort of recognition, and a quick dip into my "buckles and generally similar hardware" stash found that I had several pieces of keychains that had the appropriate kinds of connections, both in terms of the swivels and in having heavy duty clips so the ribbon parts could be swapped. (Later reading found that people recommend using fishing swivels that are readily available in Walmart.)
I dove into my ribbon stash and found that I had nothing appropriate, so wondered if something besides ribbon could be used and found a site selling 'ribbons' made from lamé. Well. I have some stashed lamé. And I figured I could just run it through the larger hem rolled to finish the edges.
Yeah, it wasn't that easy. The lamé was just too thin to work in the hem roller. I ended up serging the entirety of both long edges, then hand turning the serging in twice as I sewed. I also used the serger to connect all of the strips, since my lamé was only 55" long, then I encased the serging in french seams and stitched the seam allowances down
I ended up with...uh...an estimated 36' of it
So I moved ahead with the double part of the construction, adding a bit of embroidery stabilizer as reinforcement to the attachment end, into which I later (badly) inserted an eyelet
I added some E6000 to the back of the eyelet area and to the end of the 12" dowel rod when I attached the screw eye drapery pin and let that set up over night
Clipped it together this morning!
Took it out to the back deck to finally determine if adding all the cross seams (instead of, y'know, using 5 yards of ribbon or a continuous strip from a 5 yard cut of lamé, which I totally would have done if I'd had any on hand) would make it flow strangely.
Happily, it did not! But, wow, was it...long. Our deck is on the second level (this house is technically one story with a daylight basement, so the back deck is a story above the ground) and it very easily reached the ground when it wasn't in motion. Well, I thought, maybe that old Get In Shape Girl ribbon wand had been extra short, because it was meant as a toy and toys also are often notoriously skimpy on dimensions.
Then I started checking things to make this post and...oh. My dimensions are...off. May or may not be thinking about making another one, that actually pays attention to standards: 15' or 5m long for inexperienced people, and only doubled up 3' or 1m on the attachment end, both of which are things that seem really reasonable now that I've dealt with this thing I've made
It does roll up nicely for storage
Edit, a few hour later: I decided to pick out the stitching and reduce the doubled bit to the "proper" 1m length, and cut the whole ribbon to 6m...which...wasn't as much shorter as I expected. If it still feels too long, I can cut off another meter--what was mainly holding me back on the idea of just shortening it before was because of that doubled 12' section, so, since I decided to go ahead and take care of that, I won't have as much hesitation about cutting it shorter if needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment