Festivigate!

Its a little bit Cath Kidson, a little bit 'market chic' and its ever so vogue...its bunting!

The bunting hanging by the hedge is mine, I am not taking credit for the peace flags

I decided to make bunting for Lewis's first birthday in the hope that it will become a family ritual of 'birthday bunting'. A ritual in which we prepare and decorate our house for a birthday in the same way that one would for Christmas. I still feel excited when I see my Mum pull out the old Christmas decorations and I hope that my bunting will create a similar shiver of anticipation in my children.

Bunting is the perfect way to use up fabric scraps, or in my case use up Sarah Mac's fabric scraps (thank you Sarah). I also did buy extra fabric from Spotlight. They have an excellent new quilting range with some gorgeous prints and they sell some of the range in the form of 'flats': Little squares of fabric for $2.50 (my kinda price range).


So to bunt is super easy. First you make a triangle cutting template (mine was out of cardboard), then using pinking shears (thank you again Sarah) you cut as many lovely colourful triangles as you wish.

Next you need to make a binding. I followed the bunting tutorial on this great website. Basically it is really easy. You need to the width of the material that you are using for the binding to be 4x the finished binding width. So if you want your binding to be 1/2 inch thick then you need to cut a strip 2 inches thick. I cut several lengths from one piece of fabric and then sewed them together to make about a 6m long strip.
You then fold the sides of the fabric in to the center point and iron them into place ( your bunting should now be 1 inch thick).
Then you fold the the whole thing in half and iron it into place (it will now be 1/2 inch thick). Now you should have a lovely ribbon with no scraggly bits.
The bunting tutorial on Stitch.Rip.Repeat is VERY good so if my explanation was hard to follow do go look there.

Now you just need to tuck each triangle into the fold in the binding you have made and stitch it all together.

This was my second attempt with a sewing machine and I chose to do a zigzag stitch. Its amazing how you feel like an accomplished seamstress when you can sew a straight line! I was thinking 'project runway here I come!'. The long and the short of it is that I am very happy with my bunting and I hope that it serves many family birthdays to come.

So go forth and festivigate your room, your house, your garden, your life :)