This blog entry has been revised for making scraves specifically pacakged from Hot Potatoes. Please print these out to refer to as you create your lovely piece. You can modify these instructions to create your own scarf and change sizes of fabric to fit your own needs.
1. Fabric (velvet) for at least one side of the scarf-59" x 12". If you snip the velvet at these diminsions and tear the velvet your fabric will be perfectly straight. There is quite a bit of shedding and you might even want to do this outside.
2. A piece of burn-out velvet 60" x 13.". Tear this velvet as mentioned above if necessary. The diminsion can vary, but you want the burn out velvet to always be at least a half to an inch longer on both diminsions. You can trim the excess later.
3.An iron for embossing. Go the the bottom of Hot Potatoes home page and and see the little green rectangle. Then click on velvet. Here is a link directly to instructions as well http://www.hotpotatoes.com/velvet.asp
4 A spray bottle of water
5. 1/4 inch wide tacky tape (I sell that too) See other goodies.
6. About 25" of fringe
7. Low tack masking tape or painters tape
8. Pins
9. Scissors
10. Tthread
11. Hot Potatoes rubber stamp of your choice
Tear the velvet in a 59" x 12" strip. Cut or tear your backing fabric into another 60" x 13" strip. Simply snip the fabric and tear. Be brave, it works perfectly. Put the two pieces together an make sure the burn out velvet is slightly larger on all sides than the solid velvet.
See link in item #3 above for embossing instructions.
Begin embossing. Typically I randomly emboss over my fabric, but in this example I made a pattern. I avoid making straight lines or trying to match designs perfectly.
Emboss all the velvet that you intend to use.
The next step is to pin the fringe to the right side of the embossed fabric. Cut two pieces that are 1.5 inches shorter than the short end of the embossed velvet. These two pieces will be about 10.5-11 inches long. Pin them at the short ends of the scarf. Make sure the fringe is facing in towards the length of the scarf. You need to have about an inch of fabric at the end of each piece of fringe for making the seam.
Push the fringe in towards the center of the scarf and secure it with the blue painters tape. This will insure that your fringe does not get caught in the seams.
Sew the fringe to the velvet. Repeat on other end and remove the pins. Leave the painters tape on the scarf for now.Lay the velvet out, right side up on your work surface. At this point, check one more time to insure the burn out piece of velvet is just slightly bigger on all four sides than the embossed velvet (just 1/4 inch on all sides is sufficient) Run the Tacky Tape on the very edge of one long side of embossed fabric (right side up)
TIP: secure one end of the tape to your work surface. This makes it so much easier to remove the backing later. Notice I have it secured to my mother's beautiful Duncan Fife table. A girl has got to do what a girls gotta do!
Remove backing and overlap with another piece of tape along short edge. All the while, the tape should be at the very edge of your fabric. Remove backing and run tape down third edge wwhich would be a long side again. Remove backing, overlap last section of tape to make all four edges of embossed velvet have tape at the very edge. All backing of tape should now be removed.
Carefully smooth burn-out velvet, RIGHT SIDE DOWN, on top of embossed velvet.
DO NOT sew through the tape. The tape and you sewing machine needle are not friends. The needle wil get all sticky and this is not good. You may need to clean the needle and the plate from time to time. I use a new needle every third scarf.
Sew the two short ends I like to sew these two seams with the burn-out velvet side up. I can see the seam where I sewed on the fringe and sew right on top of that seam.
Turn scarf over and sew one long seam. One the final seam YOU MUST LEAVE A SIX INCH OPENING IN THE CENTER OF THE SEAM SO THAT YOU CAN TURN THE SCARF INSIDE OUT. This is the last seam on the remaining long side of your scarf.
Turn the scarf right side out and check your fringe and just give a look to see the entire scarf. Remove blue tape that had secured the fringe.
Turn it inside out again and trim seams and clip corners.
Lightly mist this long seam and iron it open from the wrong side only. This will make for a nice finished edge later.
Be sure the iron only goes in the seam allowance and not on the body of the scarf. The iron will leave a print and you DO NOT want that to happern.
Trim edges closely and carelfully.
Turn it right side out again and use a chop stick or something similar the push into the corners for a neat turn out.
Sew up the 6" opening by hand.
Voila!
Pour yourself a glass of wine. Put on your scarf and feel proud!
One final note: I do take my finished scarves to the dry cleaner and have the edges steamed. This give a final professional look to your lovely custom piece
