By Jennifer Theurer
Anastasia James, Spring, Texas, spent many years working with horses in 4-H and her efforts earned her many ribbons. Once her time in 4-H was done those ribbons were stored away until spring 2020 when James suddenly found herself with a lot of time on her hands.
“I wanted to do a wreath for years for my heart horse,” she said. “Finally found my ribbons. That took a little bit and I dug them all out and found some examples. I believe it was a dragon. That’s why I call it fish scales or dragon scales for the type of wreath.”
After several tries and several weeks, James had a completed wreath. As more people realized what she was able to do — her For the Love of Ribbons Facebook page currently has 21,000 followers — more requests started coming in. James has even created a piece using ribbon that matched a woman’s precious dog.
“We custom did that to match her dog,” James said. “It was nice because of how the fur was on that dog, it did really well with the type of folding I was able to do with it.”
Her designs look very complicated and her most valuable tool for creating them gives a hint to just how much talent James has.
“I’ve had this set of scissors since the beginning,” she said. “They’re safety scissors for kids doing arts and crafts when they’re like 6 or 7 and all learning to cut. They have cut through so many ribbons at this point I’m regretting the day that they are going to fail on me.”
With her trusty scissors at the ready, her favorite pieces to create are cutouts of animals such as horses and cows and she works to make the piece match the customer’s animal.
“They kind of look like their own. Their cows they liked that won most of their prizes,” James said.
Her eye for detail has served her well much like her years in 4-H and she feels bad when she hears someone else’s ribbons have ended up in a dark corner of an attic somewhere.
“Everybody put a lot of hard work into earning these, especially when it comes to the training time and the amount of effort you have to make sure that your animal is taken care of,” James said. “That takes time and practice, and we don’t want to just hide those away.”
