Fabric Bunting

This bunting (a.k.a. garland, pennants) is very sentimental to me.  It marks my official re-entry into sewing.  I was inspired to buy a (very cheap) sewing machine, shopped online for fabric and bias binding and did some web research for construction inspiration.

Bunting is pretty much an English/British institution and it is so, so popular.  With the Queen's Jubilee and the London Olympics, 2012 was the year of bunting.  But everything available in the shops is either made of paper or plastic and none of it is more than 10 flags long.  If you can even find fabric, it is really expensive.

That's not to say that my string came out cheap, I probably paid about £35 for fabric, binding and shipping (not counting tools like pinking shears and tailor's chalk) and it took me a month of evenings to cut out and sew it up.  But I do have over 30m of the cutest bunting ever!

I made it for a 5th birthday which we were hosting at a venue.  Pink, pink and more pink was in demand.  We were using a pretty drab conference room with nasty curtains and lots of veneer panelling, so it need some dressing.  The bunting fit around 3 entire walls of the room with only the doors to the garden not covered.  We were lucky that the venue were really relaxed about us hanging things.  In fact, they had a pinboard rail mounted high up for this purpose.  (These things are worth checking before you spend a month sewing 30m of bunting but I didn't and was just lucky.)  The party room pictures are still pretty blah so I've posted a different picture taken when we hung the bunting at home for the actual birthday day.  Since then, it has also decorated other party venues including a local cafe, our garden and a booth at the school fair.  (It went to a friend's wedding but it was a bit too pink for their taste.)

I cut myself a cardboard template for the flags, they are 20cm wide at the top and 25cm long.  I traced around the template with tailor's chalk and then cut out the flags with pinking shears.  A rotary cutter with ruler would have made this part of the job faster.  I then sewed the two long sides, trimmed the corner, turned right side out and poked out the corners with a knitting needle before pressing flat.  (Actually, I pressed the seams flat inside first and then pressed the outside.)

Since I was making double sided flags, I got about 4-5 flags out of .5m of fabric.  Single sided works fine and you get twice as many flags with about half the work. You could also use a cheaper, plain fabric for the backs of the flags and save the prints for the front.  I wanted it to be double-sided so I could hang it through the centre of a room. 

I chose polycotton from Online Fabrics because they had a great range of prints and they sold by the .5m so I could get more prints into the string.

I sewed each flag to the binding at intervals of 10cm.  Tip: fold the next flag in 1/2 and you have the distance between each space.  I have to confess that the zig-zag stitch idea wasn't mine.  During my research, I came across Sew Sweet Violet on Etsy.  If you want to buy some gorgeous fabric bunting, buy from her.  The running zig-zag is very forgiving when you sew out of alignment and the contrast thread adds extra interest to the string.  The binding gets folded in half and the raw edge of the flag attached inside.  I didn't press the binding in half before I pinned but you would need to with very fine binding.  Actually, sewing tape, ribbon, or strips cut on the straight grain would probably be a more practical string for the bunting, bias tape stretches more and curves away as you sew.  Violet also does the most gorgeous ends on her bunting.  Needless to say, I did not make padded shapes to dangle from the ends, but I should have.

After I made the length I needed for the party (ie, filled a whole roll of binding), I went to town and appliqued their names on a string each.  I had to buy heavier, quilting weight cotton for this, applied spray starch and also used a sheet of tissue paper to stop the stitches from forming a tunnel.  The final applique still has a bit of puckering around the letters, but it is not too noticable when it is hung up.  

I drew the letters freehand with chalk and cut them out on scraps from the main string.  Then I made up each flag in the same way as before.  I added one flag at each end in the same fabric as the letters.

I did another bunting project for the aforementioned wedding and my friend did a superb job sourcing all kinds of odds and ends of free fabric for her flags.  I ended up working with a book of curtain/upholstery samples, men's shirts, pajama bottoms and a floral top from the charity shop.  It was fun seeing it all come together on the day.