Hair Ribbons When you compete every little detail is important. If you are weak in one area then you should be the best in the other areas. Appearance counts when competing and just a few extra points in this category can help your team place or even win a cheerleading competition. One of the things we always try to do is come up with ribbons that are a little different. Here is a step by step of how we made our newest ribbon. It really is hard to come up with something different every year that looks good without being too flashy. This year we thought it might be neat to use "iron-on" letters. We went to "Hobbie Lobbie" and found all types of sizes and styles of letters. We found these sheets of metallic gold letters. They were easy to work with. Also, when you run out of a letter you need, it is easy to cut two other letters apart and put them back together to make the letter you need. We ran out of the letter C so we could cut apart a G, or a O, or Q. We cut the letters P C S and C H E E R from the iron-on sheet. We laid the ribbon on the heat press and set the press temperature to 350 degrees. While we waited for the press to warm up we placed the letters on each end of the ribbon. We followed the directions on the package of letters, then heat pressed them to the ribbon for 60 seconds. I noticed the heating time is different on other iron-on instructions. Make sure you read the directions thoroughly before you iron anything on to the ribbon. Some of the cheaper ribbons will melt if you heat them for too long. Always do a practice test on a scrap of ribbon first. This ribbon we used was satiny hair ribbon and it worked great for this. The directions for these letters said to wait until the ribbon had cooled and then gently peel off the plastic paper. We tried a couple of different accent ribbons and thought this rounded cord was different and looked nice with the bigger ribbon. We made all of our ribbons 14 inches long. Whenever possible we cut the ribbon at an angle. This is to reduce fraying and give it a nicer finished look. This type of smaller ribbon will fray so we brushed a coat of clear nail polish onto it and let it dry. We tied all three ribbons onto an elastic hair band. This ribbon is NOT meant to hold your hair in a ponytail. You need to first pull your hair up into a very secure ponytail using another hair band. Once your hair is in place and will not fall out you just wrap the band on the ribbon around the ponytail once or twice. Your ribbon's band will also be a lot less likely to break when you do this. When you don't use the ribbon band to hold your hair back, you can arrange it to look a lot prettier. In this picture you can see how nice the ribbon lays, since it's not holding back the hair. We also made this ribbon using regular flat satin ribbons for our accent colors. This ribbon was a lot cheaper and still looked nice. It is also available in many more colors than the cord we used on our first ribbon.