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Cockades!
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Posted on July 10, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, FreeSoftWear, craft:sewing
six cockades in black, grey, white, purple, in different sizes and with different centrepieces. One is only black and white and has a penguin pin in the middle.

Earlier this year, I made myself a new hat (it will be blogged), and I wanted to put a nice cockade on it. So, I looked for suitable ribbons, and couldn’t find any. I found some ribbon that looked passable, but the colours I wanted weren’t available, so I set up the website to notify me, and kept working on the hat.

Eventually the hat was done, the ribbon was still not available, so I decorated the hat with fake flowers from my stash, and started wearing it.

And that’s when I got notified that the ribbon was back in stock.

By the time the ribbon arrived, I had decided that the hat looked better with the flowers, and project cockade was put on hold, possibly for a future hat.

And then June came, and what could be a better time than that for a project based on flag colours?

As I feared, the ribbon I got wasn’t the best: it was a bit too stiff and plasticy, and not really usable for many other things. It did however work well enough for a cockade, and I decided it was a good chance to try different methods and designs, and then make another one to take pictures and publish step-by-step instructions.

And that’s the perfect recipe to find oneself surrounded by a somewhat unreasonable number of very similar cockades, I guess.

A big cockade with four ribbons, starting with purple on the outside, and a black bead in the middle covering the centre of the black ribbon. The pleating isn't the most regular, and the black ribbon at the centre is almost more gathered than pleated.

I looked around for instructions, and the ones that gave a result that was closer to my mental idea of a cockade were the ones by American Duchess, so on my first attempt I tried to follow those.

I didn’t have a cork board with a hole, so it was a bit fiddly, and the result was passable, but could have been better. Meanwhile I saw a forum post commenting on the above tutorialand that gave me ideas for a procedure more suitable to the tools I had.

A cockade with tree ribbons, starting with purple on the outside, then white, grey, and a black bead in the middle that is a bit bigger than the one on the previous one. The pleating isn't perfect, but neater than the previous one.

The second cockade I made was indeed more satisfactory, and I also started to experiment with making a center piece with ribbons, to cut down on the types of materials needed.

On this one I also tried to add a pin backing, so that I could write instructions on how to do it in what I believe is a more stable way than simply adding it to the felt backing at the end.

I’m not sure whether the other ones will be tacked to a hat, and thus won’t require pins at all, or if I’ll just put them on some dress with pins hidden under the ribbon layers.

A cockade with three ribbons, starting with black on the outside, then grey and white, and a flat pentagonal knot of purple ribbon at the centre.

And then I was ready to make a third cockade, taking step by step pictures for my website, and I planned to start on it the next morning.

Trenord had different ideas.

Thanks to the combination of independent but complete disruptions ontwo nearby train lines, I spent the morning driving a couple of people to the nearest station that was still being served by trains, and then back home less than 10 minutes before I had to start working, which if you ask1 me was pretty homophobic of the train company.

There was way less traffic than I expected, and I did enjoy the drive2, but for various reasons it meant a significant delay for this post.

Anyway, less than a week later than I had planned, halfway in June I managed to publish step by step instructions on my website, but I wasn’t done with the project yet.

Beside the fact that I still needed to finish sewing the backing felt to the cockades I had done, I also had a few ideas for more centrepieces made of ribbon I wanted to try.

And this means that I moved on to another project that was already in progress (this one will also be blogged).

A cockade with three ribbons, starting with black on the outside, then grey and white, and two squares of purple ribbon at the centre, forming a sort of eight point star. The ribbons are box pleated and this gives the cockade a bit more of a tree-dimensional shape.

After I’ve finished that one, at the very end of June I quickly made the last two centrepieces, taking pictures for the instructions, and in the next few days I also finished the cockades.

A cockade with three ribbons, starting with purple on the outside, then white and grey, and an hexagonal shape made of black ribbon at the centre. The ribbons are again box pleated.

This time, instead of plain pleats I tried to use box pleats, and I quite like the look they give, so if in the future I’ll have a need for more cockades I may use again this pleating pattern.

A cockade with just two gathered ribbons, starting with black on the outside, then white, and a linux.it pin in the middle with a black background and two eyes and an orange beak reminding of a penguin.

For the last cockade I wanted to try two things: putting a pin in the middle as a centrepiece, and gathering the ribbons.

For the pin, I found that the only one I had that had a colour scheme compatible with the ribbons I had was one with the penguin from linux.it, which had a black background, so I put black ribbon on the outside and white next to it for contrast.

And gathering was done with a whipped gather with ribbons that were one and a half times the outer circumference of their slot, and looks decent enough, but I think I prefer the look of pleated cockades a lot. Maybe it would look better with a softer ribbon.

Anyway, I think this is plenty of cockades for the time being, unless I get tempted by buying more colours of ribbon to make different ones. But I’m not making an online purchase just for those. I am not.

  1. you probably shouldn’t.↩︎
  2. also thanks to my partner who, on entering the destination town, told me to stop on the big, straight, two-way road with plenty of roundabouts to turn around, and went through the maze of one-way streets to the station by foot.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…

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