Fringey Crepe Paper Decorations

Austin’s Komen Race for the Cure is coming up quickly!  It seems that every Saturday and Sunday from now until the race (on Nov 13th – register here!) is booked with a packet stuffing or handout or some other race prep meeting.  This weekend I’m kicking off the whirlwind with a survivor tent decoration party at my house.  It’s going to be a lot of folding, gluing, taping, and cutting.  We’re putting in a lot of sweat equity to pull off some fab decorations for cheap.

One of the projects we’re working on is the backdrop for our photo booth.  When I was searching for inspiration for projects with big impact for no $$, I ran across this post on Oh Happy Day about creating fringey monograms.  Michaela created a giant 2 for her daughter’s birthday.  I knew I could take this concept and run with it.

I picked up a few supplies and dug into the stash at home to come up with everything I’d need for this project:

• Foam board – on sale at Hobby Lobby for $1.50
• Crepe paper streamers in pink and hot pink for $2.80
• Pink spray paint -$5
• Glue stick
• Scissors

I wanted to create a giant fringey Race for the Cure ribbon.  But I didn’t have time to install it on a wall like in the inspiration blog so I hit upon the idea of using foam core as the base.  It’s light, portable and easy to find.

To get started, I needed the ribbon base.  I used a projector to resize the ribbon image and project the ribbon on to the wall.  I then simply taped my foam board to the wall and traced the shape on to my foam board.  Simple.  It’s like 3rd grade art class again. 

And when you finish, you have a shape that’s all ready to cut out:

I cut the ribbon out using an box cutter knife…and it’s now that I remember that cutting curves in foam board is a giant pain in the booty.  Here are my tips for not chewing up the foam too much:

• Use a sharp #1 X-acto knife with a #11 blade.
• Slice the board in three passes: First cut the top side paper, second cut the foam and third cut the bottom side paper.
• Use a sander to clean up any edges or a Dremel if you are obsessive compulsive – totally unnecessary for this project!

As you can see, I didn’t do the best job – I need a new #11 blade so I had to fall back to my box cutter…whoops.  At least the finished product won’t show the sides too much!

Not knowing what kind of coverage I’d get with my streamers, I decided to paint the ribbon.  It made for a nicely finished look on the final piece. 

Now to the tedious part: Clipping the streamers into fringe.  In the Oh Happy Day post they found some wonderful crepe paper that they folded and fringed.  That’s really lovely, but I don’t think far enough in advance to order things like this from the internet….and crepe paper streamers are so easy to find in the store….so lots of clipping for me!  I found that folding the streamer a few times and then clipping yielded a much better length of fringed streamer than making each clip one at a time.  

I clipped for an entire episode of Colbert to get this pile of loveliness.  On to the gluing!  Here’s the fun part – just start gluing those strips of streamer down.  I spaced mine about 1/4″ apart.I wanted to capture the overlapping effect of the ribbon so I ended and started in a few places. It would probably have been better to put the hot pink on after I finished the row of light pink, but it wasn’t too difficult to tuck a few ends under.  I did do a bit of trimming on the edges here and there to smooth out the look.  Overall, I think it turned out smashing! For $2 or $3 per ribbon, the price can’t be beat – I’ve got a ton of streamers left over and I’m ready for more!

Now to use this same method to create an even bigger fringey ribbon!