Father's Day card 2021-- Spitfire

This was basically made the same way as the Mother’s Day card, except I created the decoration for this one.

So I cut the base card, and added blue silk behind it.

But then I created a ribbon Spitfire to add to the front.

I didn’t record the original creation, because I had no idea what I was doing, or if it would work.

So I’ve recreated the rough process here, in the hope you can replicate it.

I started with a double layer of kitchen roll, which I folded.

Then twisted into a tube, with one end thicker than the other. The thin end I also twisted.

I added a few stitches to hold the twist together, but as it felt a bit too long, I also chopped some of the end off.

For this task, I had bought two colours of ribbon, to roughly match the cameo paint on the Spitfire.

I cut about a meter of each piece, and sewed them together as a cross right at the centre of each length.

This cross was then added to the thick end of the plane, where the propeller would go.

I threw in a few extra stitches to hold it in place.

I then plaited the ribbon down the body of the plane. It’s very loose, I tried to make the pattern as random as possible.

This chaotic view is part way through, I went down to the bottom of the plane body (the thin end) and worked my way up. The key to doing this is to have an “up” on the piece, and use stitches here and there where they will not be seen to hold the ribbon in place.

This is sort of what you should end up with—I didn’t put any more stitches in as I didn’t want to waste more ribbon. The idea is to cover all the white patches, and avoid stripes, like I have.

You can see the little clips I used to mock up the plane!

For the wings, I used two pieces about 30-40cm long.

These were folded in on each other to create the shape. This was actually what gave me the idea to do a plane in ribbon.

I sewed them together in the middle to keep them stable, and added a few stitches to the tips of the wings to keep the shape. Folding the ribbon can really help to create the right wing tip.

The two pieces were joined. I added more detail with scraps of ribbon, the plane tail was a folded piece of ribbon, and the propeller was a brown piece of ribbon curled and sewn.

I wish I’d pointed the plane upwards—it looks as though it’s going to crash!

I did try to add a cockpit, but it didn’t work.

The RAF roundel was made with a layer of blue ribbon sewn into a circle, with a little patch of red stitched on with white thread. I could have added white ribbon, but it was all so tiny already it was too fiddly to work with.

My dad loved this card, and they knew it was a Spitfire, thankfully! It was great fun to make, and I’m looking at more stitched cards in the future.

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