SKIP TO

• Materials

• Cutting

• Interfacing

• Sewing

• Lettering

• Finishing the Ends

Sashing the patriarchy from the comfort of your own home.

I make historically accurate suffragist sashes. There was so much interest before the 2017 Women’s Marches—when I started making them—that I couldn’t meet demand, so I created this tutorial for those who want to make them at home. (You can also get them here or on Etsy.)

It's a reproduction of the sash worn by supporters of the suffrage movement of the early 20th century. The sample you see has the colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Britain: purple, white and green. This group of suffragettes is more famous today for its association with the Pankhursts and its militant methods. The other group in Britain are the suffragists of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), who wore red, white and green. They took a more peaceful tack and allowed men into their groups.

You can also create a sash with the traditional colors of the (American) National Woman’s Party: purple, white and gold. As stated by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage:

"Purple is the color of loyalty, constancy to purpose, unswerving steadfastness to a cause. White, the emblem of purity, symbolizes the quality of our purpose; and gold, the color of light and life, is as the torch that guides our purpose, pure and unswerving."

For this tutorial, I’m going to be as detailed as possible because I tend to make things as complicated as possible, but you really don’t need to be this technical about it. This is only my variation. Suffragettes didn’t get their sashes from one manufacturer; they made them at home from whatever they had. You don’t need to buy anything if you have fabric at home and just want a single-layer, single-color sash. That works too!

If you don’t have a sewing machine handy, you can use interfacing or iron-on adhesive to bond the pieces; just be sure to fold in any raw hems or use a seam sealer, as this stuff can fray like crazy.

Final Note

I hope I don’t need to point out that this tutorial is intended for people who want to make sashes for themselves and their families, friends or fundraisers, and not to sell for profit. Please respect the fact that this is what I do to support myself.

Materials

The finished sash should be about 4" wide, looped around from right shoulder to hip and fastened with a pin or sewn at the bottom. Mine end up about 38” long.

For the fabric, head for the muslin/broadcloth section of your local fabric store. The muslin where I live is around $1.99 a yard; broadcloth is about $4.99 a yard. I suggest half a yard of each in case you need to redo it. The sashes I sell are made of a heavier broadcloth, which is $9 a yard and should also be widely available. It’s got a lovely weight and thickness to it that makes suffragist sashes feel more authentic.

• 1/4 yard white cotton fabric (off-white gives it a nice vintage look)

• 1/4 yard each of two colors, depending on what style you’re creating

• Thread that matches the colored stripes of your sash

Painting the letters by hand?

• Black fabric paint or paint pen (The reason you want fabric paint is that it doesn’t bleed. Sharpies work in a pinch, but they will bleed a bit. You can also use iron-on letters from a Cricut, which I didn’t have when I first wrote this but which simplifies things in a big way and is what I’d recommend, if you can get your hands on one.)

• (Strongly recommended if you’re painting/drawing:) Enough non-woven midweight or lightweight apparel interfacing for a 2.5” x 36” length to stiffen the white fabric that you write on

• Also recommended, if you stencil: An X-Acto knife and stiff printer paper

Always wash your fabric first in hot water. It removes the artificial stiffeners and pre-shrinks it, so that it won’t shrink awkwardly if you ever need to spot-clean it later. Iron each piece of fabric when dry, before cutting.

Cutting

In this tutorial, I’ll be making a purple-and-green sash.

Most muslin/broadcloth fabrics are about 40” to 45” wide between the selvedges (factory-finished edges). You’ll notice that the fabric is stretchy in one direction and not much in the other direction. I chose to cut perpendicular to the grain of the fabric, from one selvedge to the other. Cutting that way saves the need to buy a lot more fabric than if you were to cut with the grain.

If you have a craft cutting board and a rotary cutter, it makes life way easier and your cuts more precise. If not, a yardstick, a water-soluble or air-drying pen (or chalk or even a soft pencil) and careful cutting with scissors works too. The suffragettes didn’t have fancy hardware; you don’t need to either.

If you have a pinking blade (one that cuts a crinkled edge to minimize fraying), that’s handy, but beware that by the time you’ve finished your sash, you’ll see tiny bits of darker sash lint through the lighter parts of your sash as they work their way off the edges of your fabric inside the seams. I learned this the hard way, and I still see those thready bits in my nightmares. May I suggest you test the pinking method first to see how it looks.

Fold the fabric in half along the grain (with the finished edges touching) and mark your cutting lines.

Cut two 2.5-inch pieces of white fabric and two 3.5-inch pieces of each of the colored fabrics. To make sure both sides of the fabric have straight edges, don’t use the existing edge of the fabric that was cut at the store; it will almost certainly be somewhat ragged or crooked. Line up your fabric, cut a nice straight edge, then measure from there to get your first piece.

Interfacing

Skip this part if you’re using iron-on letters.

If you are inking the letters onto your sash (not using a Cricut machine) and are using interfacing, cut a 2.5-inch piece or pieces to run the length of the front side of the sash. Using interfacing makes drawing on the sash way easier - it won’t stretch and slide all over the place when you press a pen or brush to it, and the ink won’t bleed through to the back.

You don’t need interfacing on the non-worded half of your sash, but you might want the extra weight and opacity if you have one light and one dark side color, such as in the case of the purple-and-yellow color scheme. The inner seam can show through and look a bit sloppy; I use interfacing for the back half of my sashes as well in that case. (There are some nice ivory-colored cotton broadcloths that are thick and sturdy enough that you may not need interfacing; it’s up to you.)

Lay your white fabric on the ironing board. Put the interfacing soft side up, rough side down onto the fabric.

Lay a piece of clean cotton cloth over them, and spray with water until good and damp but not soaking. Press according to the interfacing’s directions or as I do: hold the iron onto one area for fifteen seconds, then move along until done. Try pulling up the interfacing's edges to make sure it's well bonded.

If you need to add another piece of interfacing to a shorter piece, just make sure the edges match up so you don’t have a gap.

Sewing

Pin the white fabric to the purple fabric. Sew a 1/4” seam.

Pin the other side of the white fabric to the green fabric. Sew a 1/4” seam. 

Flip the sash right-side up. Iron the seams flat, away from the white fabric. You may have to stretch the sash gently to make sure the fabric is pressed along the seams correctly.

It’ll look extra crisp if you make sure the seams on the back side lie against the colored fabric, not the white stripe. That’s easy to do on the back half of your sash, where you can iron it on the inside (it doesn’t have the facing) but on the front half, facing tends to melt when presented with a hot iron.

Still working with the front half of the sash, keeping right sides together (the sash will be inside-out), pin the long edges of the colored fabric together. Sew a 1/4” seam.

Turn the sash right-side out. Since my hand doesn’t fit all the way down, I run a yardstick into the sash, scrunch it up and pull it inside-out that way.

Lay the sash flat on the ironing board. Arrange it so the colored sides are of equal width all the way down (they should be about an inch wide). Sometimes it can help to poke a yardstick into the sash to coax a side to lie the way you want it. Press.

Repeat the entire cutting and sewing process, just without interfacing, for the back half of the sash.

The reason I didn’t create a long single-piece sash was that the sash needs to be sewn at an angle on your shoulder so it lies flat. That means it will be made of two pieces. Lining up the colored stripes, right sides of the sash facing out, pin the halves together and cut at a shallow angle. To be sure the seam doesn’t fray, make a French seam: sew a very narrow hem first with the back sides together.

Turn the right sides together, press the seam flat, and sew a narrow hem which will enclose the raw edges and stay hidden underneath the sash.

Press the seam. The stripes may not match up entirely; you'll live.

This is your chance to make sure the front side of the sash is ironed nice and flat. There’s no telling what ironing will do to any given brand of fabric paint, and it’s easier to do the lettering when there are no wrinkles.

If you are using iron-on letters, skip the Lettering section and go on to Finishing the Ends.

Lettering

Skip the Lettering section if you’re using iron-on letters. I discovered the miraculous Cricut machine long after I first wrote this tutorial, and was thrilled that I can use iron-on versions of letters in the same font I describe here on my sashes. It cuts hours out of the process, in my case, but is by no means necessary.

You can freehand the lettering, but for this sash, I used a stencil on heavyweight printer paper so the paint wouldn’t creep outside the lines and I could reuse it. I chose the 130-point Chuck Noon font, which closely matches the style of some of the sashes I saw in photos from the time.

If you create a stencil and want the letters to be nice and big, there won't be room for more than two or three words. This slogan took up most of the front of the sash.

I printed the letters in a size that stayed within the two-inch borders of the white fabric but were nice and big. I cut the paper two inches high so that the stencil would rest snugly on the white part of the sash, and fastened the words together with tape. 

I used an X-Acto knife to cut out the letters.

Depending on how long your slogan is, you’ll probably want to start it a few inches from the shoulder seam (when measured from the inside of the seam). I start about a hand’s-width down from the seam. Hold your stencil (or a drawing of your lettering, if you’re going freehand) up to the sash to figure out what position looks best.  

As you haven’t closed the bottom end of the sash yet, insert a three-or-so-inch-wide piece of cardboard into the sash (the side with the interfacing, of course) so that the fabric paint doesn’t seep through onto the back. Don’t remove the cardboard until the ink is dry and you’re ready to finish the sash.

Secure the stencil to the sash with tape, ensuring that it’s facing the right way up. Do the letters look vertically centered? Cool.

Before you touch pen to sash, I highly, highly recommend practicing on a scrap piece of white fabric with your stencil. It’ll let you see whether your pen bleeds and whether you have the hang of the stencil technique. I don’t recommend stenciling with paint unless you know your technique works on your fabric.

When you’re done with that, go back to the sash. Dab a fabric pen (I recommend TeeJuice markers) lightly from the outside in to make the letter shapes, or hold the stencil very flat and draw along the outlines. Fabric pens never have quite the depth that paint does and they dry up in no time, so I only use them for outlines. I then filled in with a paintbrush and fabric paint to make the letters extra-dark.

For ornery letters like O, P, Q, R, etc., the stencils leave you with a big hole (not) to fill. I cut out the empty spaces in those letters, positioned them on the fabric, and painted around them. You’ll probably need a couple of coats of paint if you’re a perfectionist like me.

If you make an error that you simply cannot live with on your sash that you worked so hard on, all is not lost. If you have a very, very sharp knife (a little-used pocketknife, razor blade or the like will do), you may be able to scrape the ink off the fabric. Go very lightly and very slowly. I’ve done this a lot. It works, to varying degrees.

You may also be able to dab a tiny bit of off-white paint onto the unwanted bit to minimize its effect. It won’t make it disappear, but it may make you notice it less. I say you because you’ve spent a good deal of time with this sash at this point, and nobody else will notice mistakes anywhere near as much as you do. It’s still magnificent and people are going to start demanding that you make them one!

It takes fabric paint a good 8 hours to set. Don’t put the sash on right away unless you want to risk getting paint all over your clothes and the rest of the sash.

Finishing THE ENDS

Most historical sashes I’ve seen are pointed on the outside ends (the end on the far edge of the shoulder). Now that your sash is sewn together at the shoulder seam, smooth it flat. It’s up to you how sharp you want the points to be; it’s easiest if you fold the entire sash in half so that the shoulder seam touches the unfinished ends (making sure the top half of the sash hasn’t crept forward). Mark the line of the finished seam with a pencil or chalk onto the unfinished ends, and cut the sash’s bottom end that way. I suggest this because it’s hard to visualize the direction the angle should go, and as it mirrors the shoulder seam, this is an easy way to do it in the right direction.

Fold the raw edges in on each half of the sash, and pin them.

Don’t sew both sides of the sash together like you did before, of course; these sides stay separate, and then you use a safety pin, protest pin or whatever to bind them at your hip when you wear it.

You can either choose one thread color to close the bottom hem or be fancy like I do on my Etsy sashes and use the corresponding color thread to sew right along the very edges of the entire length of the sash, including the ends, to help the sash lie flat. It isn’t necessary but it really does make it look lovely.

Done? Yay!

Dress up and throw on your sash. (If you hand-lettered it, make sure the paint is dry!)

Bring the sash ends together and fasten them in an X shape at the bottom with a pin or button suitable to your occasion. (I didn't have one here. Imagine it.)

If you made any errors that still bug you, remember that when you wear it, it’ll be moving and shifting, and like I said, the overall effect will be stunning to people who have never laid eyes on it.

Also keep in mind that in the pre-suffrage days, many of these sashes were made by hand without sewing machines, and were hand-lettered without proper lighting. Any errors just add to the authenticity.

That's it! If you have any questions, or if you spot an error, let me know. And please, send links to pictures of your finished sashes! I'd love to see them.