Sunday 22 April 2012

DIY: Bunting

You know when you had a rather lengthy to do list? Filled with important things like actually food shopping so you and your boyfriend don't starve? Or writing lesson plans so you're actually prepared for going back to work next week? Or even, hanging up the washing that has been staring at you from the machine since last night this morning...

Well the other afternoon it rained. So I sacked all of that off and nipped very rapidly to the fabric store three doors up {it must be fate}. I picked out two of their looovely and clashing in a coordinating kind of way fabrics and hurried back to put on a pot of tea, elaine paige's musical show from Sunday {it's a guilty pleasure}, hauled out my sewing kit and set about making bunting. And now I'm blogging about it. Productive? Always. Just perhaps not in the best kind of ways!

Anyway, I googled "bunting tutorial' and loosely followed one of the 9 million tutorials the search revealed. And I mean loosely: details like the fact that my template was cut out of an old christmas card, so that kind of dictated the size of my triangles, or that I don't own a rotary cutter {never heard of one. Now I want one} meant a relatively easy project was made a bit more fiddly and innaccurate by my incredible cutting skills.

The project itself is easy but requires patience. I cut 12 triangles from each piece of material and pinned them back to back. I then used a zig zag stitch setting on my machine to sew them together. I debated turning them inside out so you wouldn't see any seams but I rather liked the sweet effect of the visible stitching. I left the top of the triangle unsewn as this would be covered by the tape at the top.


 In the end, I decided to stitch each flag to alternate sides of the tape as it wasn't wide enough to fold in half. This meant one pattern - the flowers - always had a nice neat stretch of tape at the top. To rectify the less awesome looking side with the polka dots {which had no tape} I finally busted open the tub-o-buttons {thank you wasted hour in Hobbycraft} and picked out a load of buttons of similar colours. I picked purple and white as I thought they went quite well with the colours of the bunting.


Fast forward an episode of grey's anatomy {I am an addict even though it leaves me an emotional wreck} and I have something that looks a little like this...


I'm justifying it's existence by saying that it was mainly for yesterday evening's festivities but who am I kidding. It may well have just found its permanent home in the hallway. Which I need to show you pictures of. It used to be TURQUOISE and now look at how beautiful and serene it is. More on that. Promise.

Love B
x

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