This weekend, I had the honor of co-hosting a baby shower for my boyfriend’s sister. Little Jack is due in July, and they’ve already set up a beautiful little nursery for him with a sweet little farm theme. So we decided to go with the farm theme for the shower!
In keeping with the spirit, I decided to make a little bunting out of cowboy-esque colors and patterns. I bought very inexpensive fabric from Walmart, and I’d say they turned out pretty darn cute:
What you will need:
2 yards of fabric (pick out complimenting patterns! I used 5 fabrics)
fabric scissors
sewing machine (or lots of free time to hand-stitch)
matching/neutral thread
pins
ruler
iron and board
Here are the basic steps I took, if you want to make these yourself!
1. Cut out a triangle pattern from a piece of paper – mine measured 6 inches across the bottom and 7 3/4 inches for each side length. I then used this template to cut out a whole lot of triangles. You can do as many as you’d like, but I believe I cut about 30.
2. Next, I took my triangles and pinned them (right sides together) to the uncut fabric, trying to make the best use of space that I could. I sewed the lengths of each triangle, but left the bottoms unsewn. Basically, rather than cutting out 60 triangles and sewing them together in twos, I took this short cut to make it a little quicker. This picture shows which parts are sewn and which are not:
3. Next, you cut them out. Once you cut them out, you can flip them inside out, which is why you left the bottom unsewn. When you flip them, you should have the right side facing out on both sides of your triangle. Now, you get to iron them flat and you have pretty little triangles!
4. Now, to string them all together, I cut long strips of my left over fabric. I folded each strip in half (right sides out) and ironed the crease. Then I folded the rough edges in, and ironed that as well, so they looked like this on the inside:
and this from the outside:
5. The easiest part is next! I laid out each strip and tucked my triangles into the fold. I put two pins on each flag, pins pointing down so they would be easy to sew over.
6. Last, I sewed a simple straight line across the whole thing, tacking each flag in place. You could sew these together to make longer buntings, but I left them short (five strings of six flags each) so we could hang them all around.
When I chose my fabric, I picked three darker patterns, and two that were light and fun. I planned to use more of the light ones in order to break up the patterns. That said, you can obviously choose patterns and colors however you like. Since I planned to use more of the lighter fabrics, I bought 1/2 yard of each of those (two patterns), and 1/3 yard of the others (three patterns). That is how I came to the conclusion of 2 yards of fabric for 30 flags worth of bunting!
It is called “Sew Sweet by Meghan.” For now, I have just posted a couple of simple, sweet buntings I’ve made. I hope to expand it over time, but for now, you have to start somewhere!
And burlap bunting is oh so popular, and so versatile. Here’s one of our engagement pictures with the date bunting I made…
Though it can always be made with sweet words as well…
I hope you will check it out and add me to your favorites if you are a regular Etsy user! If you told me you were a Megster Meter reader, I would probably give you a discount…just saying 🙂
