How to: Ribbon Wands

My wedding is now less than three weeks away! I’m so very excited and almost 100% ready to go. The tailoring of my dress and my fiance’s suit will both be done this week, the final floor plan and seating arrangement have been determined, and my crafts are all done. I can’t believe everything has happened so smoothly.

Saturday night, the fiance and I spent a couple hours making 100 ribbon wands for our wedding guests. The venue for my ceremony/reception doesn’t allow rice, bubbles, flower petals, or birdseed, so we decided to give our guests some festive wands to wave around after we say “I do.”

These are pretty easy to make, but this craft could result in hot glue burns or a staple through the finger. We didn’t end up with bad burns or staples in our hands, but we had some time to exchange our respective childhood staple-though-the-finger horror stories. I can only imagine how much it would hurt to get a staple gun staple though your hand.

Supplies

hot glue gun, glue

staple gun, staples

ribbon (I used 7/8″ Offray grosgrain ribbon in Baby Maize, Spring Moss, andWhite.)

1/4″ dowels, cut to 12″ in length (Lowe’s kindly cut my 48″-long dowels in to four equal pieces for free for me!)

spray paint

scissors

liquid stitch

Directions

Spray paint your dowels in desired color & let dry. I went with gold and silver to match my ribbon wall dowels and table numbers.

Cut your ribbon in to 18″ pieces. I needed three pieces per wand, so I had 100 each of my three colors, for 300 total pieces. Using liquid stitch, seal one end of each of your pieces of ribbon so it won’t ravel. Let dry.

Cut a 1.5″ piece of your ribbon for each of your wands. Seal one end of each piece. Let dry.

Using one of each color of your ribbon, staple the non-glued end to a dowel using a staple gun. Try to get as close to both the end of the dowel and the ribbons as possible. Try not to staple your hand! As you can see in these pictures, the ends of the staple will stick out a little bit on the far side of the dowel.

Using your hot glue gun, glue one of your 1.5″ ribbon pieces over the staple and around the dowel to hide the raw ends of the ribbon and the staple. Let dry.

Repeat 99 times. My wands look a little like muppets when they’re all bundled together. I really hope my guests have a good time whirling these around at our wedding. The nice thing about these wands is that they can double as a wedding favor, and I don’t have to feel that bad that a lot of these will inevitably wind up in the trash. Between buying wholesale ribbon and the fact that the dowels I got weren’t too expensive, these didn’t cost all that much to make!