See also: Stock Ribbons and Ribbon Gallery
Fill in your e-mail address here to sign up for my "Ribbons" mailing list, so you'll know when my orders go in. As a rule of thumb, you should allow at least four weeks for your ribbons, possibly longer depending on whether I've got an order going in for the convention you're interested in.
You can still order ribbons on a week's notice, if you haven't planned ahead, but you may need to get them directly from one of the ribbon printing companies yourself. (See below.)
You'll find different pricing structures, minimum orders, colors available... #1 is the outfit I use. #2 is the biggest one in the business. Although, a cautionary note -- some people have trouble with the Hodges glue wearing out and their ribbons falling off.
Mailing list info is near the bottom of this page.
Okay, you want to order your ribbons along with one of my orders. To get the best price, I wait until I have at least 1000 ribbons; typically each order I send in to the little old ladies in Tucson at RV have between 1000 and 2000 ribbons, total.
I'll take paypal payments, my usual hazel address at this domain. Shipping, postage, tax, and the occasional CARE package for the ladies that run the shop are all included. Paypal accepted. Reprints are cheaper because there's a one-time setup charge built into these prices. Current prices (I had to raise them as of May 2009):
The base price is $.275 per ribbon, plus $10.00 plate charge for each new title. So, 250 new ribbons would be .275 x 250 + 10 = $78.75. A separate zinc plate is etched for each for a new title, regardless of whether it's plain text or has a logo or picture on it, or how many lines it is.
The ribbons I usually order are the horizontal style, 1 5/8" or 2" high and about 4" wide. If you want vertical ribbons, or you want a special extra-wide ribbon, ask for a quote. The 1 5/8" ribbon stock is the size Hodges uses for their one-line ribbons. Because ours come with a skinnier piece of tape, there's more printable area, so it's no trouble going two lines on that size. That size is not available in all colors, which is why some of the ribbons are 2" high.
Ribbons are available in these solid colors:
red, maroon, pink, peach, rose, neon pink, neon fuchsia, dark fuchsia, "tomato" (really a reddish or "safety neon" orange), orange, old gold, yellow, light yellow, neon greenish yellow, tan, white, off-white, gray, light green, emerald (this is the regular green color), forest green, "teal" (actually a dark bluish green), navy, blue, medium blue, light blue, turquoise, lavender, purple, black, brown, bronze, mocha.
There's also a rainbow and a pastel rainbow ribbon; those are more expensive, so there's a penny surcharge on those.
And there are these stripe ribbons where the color progresses in different shades from a light color at the top to a dark stripe at the bottom, in a spectrum effect. These are currently available in red stripe and blue stripe. Check before ordering, because they've already run out of some of the stripes that we've ordered a lot of. There's a penny surcharge on these. Ask for pricing if you want six-color "Pride flag" rainbow stripes. (Strangely enough, it depends whether you care if red's on top or purple is.)
The most popular color for a ribbon? Black of course -- everyone wants to have have black because it's unique. I won't stop you (although I can't do black/white -- the best I can get you is black/silver), but I'll urge you to consider one of the other possibilities other than black/silver or black/gold.
Colors of foil printing: gold, silver, copper, blue, green, red, black (see below), or rainbow. I don't recommend using rainbow foil on dark-colored ribbons.
RV recently got some new BLACK foil. It seems to work well all of the ribbon colors we've tried so far.
No, we can't do WHITE -- RV can only handle the metallic foils. Use silver instead. If you have to have white printing, check out the other outfits starting with www.hodgesbadge.com.
The ribbons are printed by hand, on a letter press. As such they're not guaranteed to be perfectly centered -- it's a little old lady doing the work, and we're lucky enough that most of them come out straight and parallel to the bottom edge.
Speaking of bottom edge, the printing tends to be bottom-justified even though I draw them as centered in my mockups. I think one of the reasons they're printed this way is to maximimze the stacking-them-up capability.
Most of the ribbon companies have one price for stock typesetting using their typefaces in house, which is hand set at some places like RV, and another price for using custom art. I wore out my welcome in the summer of 2006 with far too many hand-set ribbons, so RV has asked me to submit custom art for all of my ribbons.
So printing two or three lines on the ribbon: no problem. Samples of ribbons I've ordered for myself and for others.... Because we use custom art for all the ribbons, we can put almost any kind of logo or clip art and any font on your ribbons. I use the Clarendon family of typefaces for most of the silly ribbons I order, but if you've got a favorite font we can use that. No problem. Many thanks to Lindsay Tallman for occasionally drawing things for these ribbons. Regarding art, this isn't a place for shading or fine detail. Keep it straight black and white (anti-aliasing is okay), no lines thinner than .01 inch or gaps between printed areas thinner than .02 inch. If you must have some kind of shading, use lines or cross-hatching -- look at the portraits they print in the Wall Street Journal for inspiration.
Most of the ribbons we print are dark ribbons with light printing. Doesn't make much of a difference for straight text, but if you've got art that's a physical object -- like a hand, wizard, dragon, condor, penguin or a space station -- you may want to see how your black and white art looks when it's presented as a negative image.
Therefore I suggest starting earlier if you want something fancy!
Usually I lay out the art for the ribbons. (No charge.) Sometimes people submit their own art, as a high-res PNG or a PDF file or something like that. If you go that route, remember it should be solid black on white. Even if you want yellow ribbons with blue printing, please submit it as a white background with a black design!
I send in an order every month or two during the busy convention season.
To learn when I'm sending in an order, join the mailing list by sending e-mail to ribbons-subscribe@lists.bostonbaden.com and respond to the confirmation message you'll receive. Or fill in your e-mail address here and respond the confirmation message that you'll receive.
As a rule of thumb, though, if the convention you want the ribbons for is less than a month away, you probably want to send in your own order instead of waiting for my next one to go in. And even allowing one month is pushing it. The reason for this is because while I like to allow three weeks for them to work on my orders, I don't send in an order every week -- so my order might not be going in three weeks before your convention.
As far as I know, RV can't put two colors on the same ribbon. (Not counting the multi-colored rainbow foil.) You probably want Hodges. For a price, they can actually do full-color printing: Imagine a color printer running with a roll of ribbon material instead of a stack of paper. But that's very expensive.
Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you might see if there's a wide ribbon at Michaels or Jo-Ann Fabrics that suits your needs, and buy a pair of pinking shears and a roll of Scotch "Scrapbooking Tape" to roll your own ribbons that way.
Yes, it's the double-sided tape that has a plastic peel-off strip. I've found it handy in case I run across a tapeless ribbon. This photo shows the red/purple packaging, I've also seen it in a mostly purple package. I don't use the double sided sticky back tape in the yellow package, because it doesn't have the protecto-strip.
Getting married at a convention? I have BRIDE, GROOM, BEST MAN and MATRON OF HONOR. If that's what you need, I can send you one each for a dollar plus postage.