Separator Poles

I thought for quite a while on what to use to make the separator poles for the cake.  I could have just stacked the tiers on top of each other, but I love tiered cakes, and needed a place for all my awesome flowers, lol.  I had a lot of different ideas - some doable, some not.  I finally settled on wooden dowels covered in the colors of each branch of the military.  I was in Washington DC a few months ago, and found a display of military ties in a store, and took a picture of them. 

I purchased 1/2 inch wooden dowels from the hardware store, and had them cut to length, and sharpened on the ends.  I had to be able to push them into the dummy cakes, so they had to be sharp.  I then wrapped black floral tape along the length of the dowel rods so that the fondant would stick to it better:

So, I colored the fondant the appropriate colors, and rolled out strips of fondant and attempted to wrap them around one of the dowel rods.  Three tries later (and miraculously, no dowels were flung across the kitchen), it was evident that this was not going to work.  So, rather than have crappy looking fondant separators, I chose to use satin ribbon to create the separators. 

I laid the ribbon out on the table, taped the two main colors together on the back, then wrapped it around the dowel rod.  I wrapped the dowel rod with double stick tape before I attempted to tape the ribbon on.

It went fairly smoothly doing it this way.  Here are the finished separators:

The ends are taped so they wouldn't unravel, and so that they would fit smoothly into the dummy cakes.