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