What makes ribbon curl

Tightly curled ribbons black ribbon make pretty spiral curls which are perfect accents for elegant gift wrapped presents or use them to fancy up your hair ties and hair accessories. Loosely curled or wavy ribbons gold ribbon are great to use as trailing material for masks, hats and other crafts. Curling Fabric Ribbons. Share Tweet Pin it. Featured Crafts. Carefully wind the ribbon around the length of the dowel. Piles and piles of curls.

We'd often add more lengths of ribbon to make the pile of curls larger. But what makes the ribbon curl? Scientific American took on the subject a few years ago for Valentine's Day.

They determined that it had to do with how different parts of the ribbon stretched as you curled it. And what's the best way to curl the ribbon? And it turns out the way a ribbon stretches once you reach that yield can tell you exactly how to get that perfect curl.

In March of this year a UK-based team of researchers published the first study analyzing the physics behind ribbon curling in the journal PNAS.

That's right, they did an entire study just to figure this out. The researchers attached one end of a ribbon made of PVC, a kind of plastic, to a winding cylinder and the other end to a weight. The cylinder pulled the ribbon across a blade while the weight provided a resistance. When a ribbon runs over a blade it's actually the outside of the ribbon that's being stretched and deformed. While the inside basically stays the same. When the force being applied to the ribbon is stronger than the yield, the outside of the ribbon gets permanently stretched out, creating that festive spiral shape.

Now, the force you need to reach the yield depends on the material. So not all ribbons will curl exactly the same way. But the team found that in general three main factors affect the shape of the curls. First using a sharper blade forms tighter curls, because it bends each part of the ribbon more.

Pulling the ribbon across the blade more slowly also forms tighter curls, because it gives the material more time to stretch and deform. As the ribbon was pulled across the blade, its outermost side would begin to stretch and deform, while the side touching the blade would remain the same. This uneven stretching, scientists explain, is what caused the ribbon to curl.