Festive Friday Blog Hop #5: Using the Sew Ribbon Tool

Welcome to another Festive Friday!  Festive Fridays is a bimonthly blog hop hosted by Terri Sproul.  It gives us the opportunity to create Christmas cards all year long so that we have a batch of them ready to send out at the holidays.  You should have arrived here from:   Brenda’s blog   If you’d like to start the hop from the beginning, head on over to: Terri’s blog.

For this card, I decided to use my new Sew Ribbon (from the makers of Sew Easy, We R Memory Keepers).  This gadget easily puts evenly spaced slits into the project that you’re working on so that you can weave ribbon through it.  The one that I have is shown at the top – “weave”.

The guide for the Sew Ribbon comes in two pieces that fit together easily with magnets.

You place the guide – one part on the top of your cardstock and one part underneath so that the magnets hold it in place – in the desired location on your project.  Then there’s the cutter – you can see it above – it’s what looks like a pink knob sticking out of the guide.  You simply press the cutter into each of the slits on the guide.  I found it poked through quite easily and it was a quick process.

The Sew Ribbon comes with ribbon “needles”.  These are plastic with adhesive on them.  You basically embed the ribbon inside the needle so that you have something stiff to use to poke the ribbon through the slits.  Note:  the kit only comes with 3 of these needles so you get very few uses out of it before you’re going to have to buy a pack of refills.  I was thinking I could get more uses out of the needles by “threading” extra long pieces of ribbon (not just a piece the size I needed right then and there for my current project)– perhaps in basic colours like white – then I could pull that through the slits right to the very end and cut it off so that I still had a long piece that was threaded.  Replacement needles appear to be selling for about $1-3 for a package of 10 – not outrageously expensive but still, that could add up quickly if you’re going to use this tool often.

The Sew Ribbon definitely makes the process of adding woven ribbon to your projects much easier.  I found it very straightforward to use and it took very little time.  In fact, if you’ve tried the Sew Easy and found that it took a little practice to really get the knack of using it, you’ll be pleased to know that the Sew Ribbon is simple to use right from the very beginning.  I paid around $17 here in Canada for my Sew Ribbon.

For this easel card, I used a piece of basic red cardstock as my background.  On the bottom /inside of the card, I used a piece of green gingham Creative Memories scrapbooking paper and to embellish the front of the card, I used pieces of dark green cardstock shapes from a Creative Memories Short Cuts pack I had in my stash.  I also added two pieces of CoreDinations Colour Core Cardstock from the Cosmo Cricket Classics Collection pack.  I sanded it a bit to reveal some of the white interior and add texture to the card.  I sewed on buttons to act both as embellishments, and on the bottom of the card. to serve as a way of holding up the easel.  Of course, I also added the ribbon embellishment through the use of my Sew Ribbon.  If there’s one thing I’m unhappy with about this card, it’s with the glue I used.  I used the Perfect Paper Adhesive from USArtquest.  I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the glue.  It was my first time using it and I think perhaps, it just wasn’t the right application for this project and you can see some of it around the rick rack shapes.  Other than that, I really love this card and am definitely going to make some more of these easel style cards.

Thanks for stopping by!   Your next stop is:  Robin’s Nest

Full list of participants is below! Happy hopping!