How to Set a TabItem's Border Programmatically

Hi,

   I'm dynamically creating TabItems in C# and adding them to my TabControl with great success.  However, I don't how to set the tab item's border.  When I specify a BorderThickness of 3 it doesn't take.  I'd like to allocate a border and set its thickness to 3, specify a corner radius and assign it to the TabItem.  I've searched on this and the closest I found was to allocate the Border and call something like border.Child = tabItem.  But when I do this, I can't add the tabItem to the collection and if I add the border to the collection it doesn't work right.

   Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,