Orange and Black Musicians (Sashes & Embroidery)

Our rapper musicians, being men, could not be expected to wear the same skirts as the dancers, so their kit went back to the rapper basics of sashes.

I ran into difficulties however in making the sashes. To make our musicians match the dancers the proper thing would be to make the sashes out of the knit fabric which would be fine but sashes need to lie flat at the hanging ends.
My first attempts ranged from sad to outright pathetic.

a few of the "successes"

Finally I had to give it up-this knit fabric was too stretchy that despite dunking it in starch, there was no way to stop it from rolling before bunching out awkwardly at the ends. New fabric had to be found.

Now, I'm not sure you've ever tried to find orange fabric in Yorkshire. The only real choices all tend to be either too red or too seem destined for health and safety high vis wear. In the end the high vis option won mainly because I found this delightful mystery fabric in the Hillsborough fabric shop's clearance section. It's a tough fabric that is actually almost self-interfaced so it holds basically any shape you sew it into.

£1.99 a metre? that's 80p a sash!

So despite it being its own light source (while it was laid out in my sewing room I kept thinking I had left the lights on overnight...instead it was just the fabric reflecting the overcast light), this was going to become our sashes. With no need for interfacing, buckram, weights, cardboard, etc, it was a simple process to sew 2 rectangles together, starch and lightly iron (it melts at higher temperatures) it flat, and whipstitch the ends closed. Easiest sewing project ever? Yep. Does the kitmistress need to keep ironing the tying wrinkles out? Sadly, yes.

Of course I didn't leave well enough alone and decided I'd embroider a monogram on them. A simple typographical design that would be able to be easily but stylishly rendered with stitches. Which lead to me running out of black embroidery thread and discovering that Sheffield shops do not stock black embroidery thread. o.O    So 2 of the sashes are embroidered edges and only the Tommy's sash is filled in. Anyway! Used backstitch to outline the SSR.

oh right, and those are the trophies we won.