Flash and Trash - Part V

The Flash and Trash Part

Now that the quilting is done (thankfully, a vest has few pieces!), I can work on something a little more fun:  another embellishment component, the fringe.  The fringe *is* the flash and trash of this garment - it is what Cathy Franks calls the flash and trash - lots of yarns, fibers, serger trimmings, etc.  So, out of my collections came the stuff for the fringe.

One of the major components of the fringe is yarn.  I have quit a bit of yarn that has been given to me and that has been left over from projects I've knitted.  Most of the leftovers is sock yarn and I really didn't want to make some mish-mosh socks using up all the leftover bits anyway. (VickiW, you should recognize that bright green yarn in the top of the picture.) Between that and some stuff in the right colors from my funky fiber collection and some shiny serger trimmings, I had enough stuff for fringe.  To make the fringe, I simply wound all the yarn and stuff around a DVD case and cut through the yarn strands to get even lengths.

I then laid it all out trying to distribute the colors evenly, but randomly.  I know that doesn't make sense, but I didn't want big clumps of orange or purple with no interesting fibers or shiny ones mixed in.  I guess you could call that "selective randomness" or some such crazy thing, but I just wanted a nice distribution without really trying too hard or counting numbers of strands.

Once the fringe looked pretty much how I wanted it, I stitched a section of it at a time to a piece of twill tape, using a zigzag stitch on the sewing machine.  The twill tape is necessary to hold the fringe together during the construction process and will be trimmed away once the seams are complete. 

The whole process was actually pretty quick and easy, and now there are about 2 or 3 yards of fringe ready for the construction process. 

Once the construction of the vest is done, I can add the flowers - that promises to be fun, because I can pull out all my shiny, sparkly threads!

Parting Shot:  Epic Battle.  Serious military strategy is going on here.  Since the computers are networked, playing these sorts of games against one anther is easy.  Not to mention time consuming, but at least they're busy!