During my Nerdvember challenge I needed to come up with 11 work appropriate nerdy outfits, which is far less than a typical November, but more than I had any idea what to do with! I decided a Ms. Marvel style scarf would be stylish enough to wear with my usual business attire, but also nerdy enough that I could include it in Nerdvember. This decision came to me when I was in a fabric shop completely failing to find the fabric I came in looking for (seven meters of silver lining fabric, one day you will be mine..) and not wanting to leave empty handed. It turned into one of the better snap decisions I have made in a fabric shop!
I started with 3m of red rayon, just over 10m of ridged yellow ribbon, and thread to match. This, strangely, turns out to make a scarf which is 3m long, which is too long! Learn from my mistakes! However, the look I was going for was the Ms. Marvel cape effect scarf as drawn by Jamie McKelvie, so there was some logic to the decision, just not much.
After cutting the fabric in half along it’s 3m length I was ready to start. I also had a back-up length of fabric in the somewhat likely event of something going disastrously wrong. As I don’t have a roll-hem foot, I started by trimming the salvage, then folding, ironing, pinning then sewing as small a hem as I could manage all the way around. This took far longer than I anticipated, but did end up looking reasonably neat.
Next I pinned and sewed the first strip of yellow ribbon to the outside edge of the scarf over the top of my nice neat hems. I only sewed the outside edges as I hoped to tuck the edging of he star detail underneath them before sewing them down properly. Again, 3m of fabric is a very long way to sew and try to keep a straight line at the same time! This went a lot smoother than the hem, but it still took much longer than I anticipated.
Next was the star detail. I used the ribbon and some pins jammed into the floor to rough out the details then pinned them down more firmly. I sewed the whole thing down in one go like a very strangely shaped rectangle and am rather proud of how I managed to colour inside the lines the whole way, so to speak. I then used the first side as a template for the second side to try and get them to look as similar as possible, repeating the pinning and sewing steps. Lastly I sewed down the inside edges of the border ribbon and I was done!
I didn’t have the foresight to buy enough ribbon to complete the second side, then when I went back to the fabric shop that colour was all gone. Who would have though yellow ribbon would be that popular?! Hopefully they get the colour back some time in the future so I can finish the second side, but for now I’m quite happy with my efforts!
As you can see, 3m of scarf is slightly too long, but I do love the cape effect it brings.
