I'm On A Bunting Bender!

I already showed you the Jiji bunting...

Now it's time to do a tutorial on the primitive bunting I saw at the craft fair I worked!

As you may remember, the lovely Shannon of Random Sacks of Kindness

showed me some primitive bunting she made to 

decorate her booth and her camping site when she went camping:

I loved, loved how they fluttered in the slightest breeze;

and was determined to make some of my own.

To the crafting table!

I wanted to make these as quick as possible, since they were going to be looooong.

I started with an easy width:  six inches wide, so I could just zip across

my six inch wide ruler.

To make the triangles, I also wanted easy, so I used a triangle template I already had.

This triangle template came from a set I got years ago;

it's a "triangle within a rectangle" template.

As a bonus, I found a Mother's Day card in the template envelope.

Judging from the tippy writing,
I'm guessing I got this from the kids when they were about three.

Awww!!

 (*Takes a minute to get misty about those sweet little preschoolers, then recovers

when I realize my almost twenty-one-year-old twins can both now

drive their own dang selves wherever they want.  Hurrah!*)

Most of these fabrics are either batiks, plaids, or okay-when-viewed-on-either-side,
and I only used a single, unseamed, unfinished thickness of them for the bunting.

BUT, I did have this cupcake fabric I wanted to feature

that really wasn't that cupcake-y on the back side.

So after cutting the six-inch strips, I placed two six-inch strips together,

WRONG SIDE TO WRONG SIDE, 

marked the triangles instead of cutting them...

 ... pinned along the edges of the two strips...

then sewed a quarter inch on either side of the blue lines.

Once I did that, I cut along the blue lines, so I had a two-sided cupcake pennant!

Now it was time to sew!

I nerdily used a complex method of assuring there was a sufficient randomness

to all the pennants.

Then I stacked the pennants to the left of my machine, 
zigzagged over an eighteen-inch "attaching" tail,
placed the yarn above the upper edge of the first one,
and just zigzagged right over the yarn.

You can't see it, but I put a little Sharpie dot on my clear surface,

about an inch in front of the sewing foot.

When the sewn pennant was all the way sewn, I would line up the NEXT pennant

on the dot and put the yarn on it.

It made the spaces in between the pennants pretty uniform.

To keep the yarn corralled, I put it in the box taped on the edge of my sewing table.

I found the trick to the yarn to be keeping it nice and taunt.  I pulled it straight back, firmly,

so it wouldn't go wibbly-wobbly on the top of the pennant when I was sewing it.

I used about fifty pennants, and it made a looong string!  About eleven yards!

For some of the fabrics, I couldn't find a wide enough variety,
so I did a little fabric painting before sewing.

For example, I used some gold paint on some yellow-gold batik to make this pennant

for my Harry Potter Gryffindor bunting:

You can see below I also painted some of the red fabric for this string.

That's all the same string!  Like I said, fifty pennants made a lot of bunting.

Wouldn't this Gryffindor bunting be awesome at a Harry Potter party?

THIS PIRATE BUNTING.

The idea of it being used at a Pirate Wedding makes me clutch my heart and swoon.

This silvery-green bunting was hard to photograph to do it justice,

but it would make the coolest Slytherin bunting

OR

the prettiest, sweetest garden bunting for a wedding.

(Every once in awhile I make something that I'm tempted to keep,

and I can't stop imagining this around my own back patio.)

Sometimes, a girl would just like to get her princess on.

The pinks, purples, whites and creams would be great for a real girly-girl.

And what about that cupcake bunting?

Looks pretty good, no?  It's going to be a gift.

But all the rest will be available in my Etsy shop!