Ruffled Streamers!

I'm throwing my one-year old a birthday party and hosting a baby shower for a friend this week. I'm cutting my costs by making my own decorations.

You've probably seen the cute ruffled streamers on Pinterest. There are 2 pins in particular. One is a difficult version and the other is an easy version. It was time to try it out.

I went to the MADE blog for the easy tutorial.

I followed the directions and set my sewing machine at 5.0 for the length of my stitches and turned up the tension to strong. I also put my streamers on a wooden dowel to keep my streamers from getting all tangled and twisted. IT WORKED GREAT!!!! It started ruffling on its own!

After I was done ruffling, I rolled my new streamers up nicely to store them until the party!

They just look so pretty. I'm totally reusing these for Valentine's day!

A COUPLE OF THINGS TO CONSIDER:

• If you are using a wooden dowel (which I suggest you do) make sure that your roll of streamers are about the same size. I tried using a small roll and a large roll on the same dowel, not thinking, and had a little tangled mess on the dowel.

• The smaller the circumference of the dowel, the better. I found it a little difficult to slide the dowel through some of the tighter-wound rolls of streamers.

• Decide ahead of time how long you want your streamers. Since you are sewing, once you cut the thread, the stitches will begin to fall out unless you begin and end your stitches with a back stitch. If you decide your streamers are too long and you want to cut them, one way to get around this problem is to tape off the the threads where you want to cut with some clear tape. Then cut down the middle of the tape so that the threads stay taped down and the stitches don't begin to unravel.