I have a feeling that bunting may be dying down soon, but it's still pretty hot in the wedding world. I've seen tons of wedding photos with bunting hanging from the ceiling, hanging on tables and from trees. Bunting hanging from anywhere you can hang something basically. I didn't want to do bunting at first because I thought it was cliche, time consuming, and not worth the trouble. And have you seen how much it costs to buy one on etsy (mainly because they are time consuming)? Especially one intended for a wedding?! Don't get me started on the inflation people feel they can put on anything as long as word wedding is in front of it. But then I realized how much fabric we are using for the wedding and didn't have any "decorations" made out of the vintage sheets that I've used in many other places throughout the wedding. So yeah, I made the stinking bunting!
Let's pretend this picture wasn't taken in my parent's house at midnight k? and you can also take this time to mourn the loss of my dslr camera again too if you would like.
I made one to hang above the dessert table that says "Love is sweet" and one to hang from the front of our table that is just small flags to separate it from the other tables. Want to make your own bunting? Great, follow these directions:
You'll need the following:
- about 4-8 different colors/patterns of fabric. This will depend on how colorful you want your bunting to be. I used my vintage sheet stash.
-Bias tape in a complimentary color. You'll need two packages for this long banner.
- Freezer paper - you can get this at the grocery store by the aluminum foil. It's awesome stuff, I never use it in the freezer, but it's great for all kinds of crafts and one roll will last you forever!
- fabric paint or acrylic paint with textile medium in a color that will stand out on all of your fabric choices.
- Love is sweet template - Download Love_is_sweet (pdf) there's a photoshop template at the bottom of the post if you want to create your own saying.
- scissors and pinking shears (optional)
- pen or pencil
- iron
- sewing machine (you could use fabric glue or fusible stitch witchery if you really had to though)
Print off the template.
Get out your freezer paper and trace all of the flags and letters. I was able to fit three flags per row.
Now you want to cut out all the flags and use smaller scissors or an exacto knife to cut out the letters.
These are your stencils! Now you will want to iron these on to your fabric.
I just doubled my fabric (wrong sides together), ironed on the flag and roughly cut around the flag leaving about an inch of fabric around it. They look like this when they're done:
Cover your painting surface. I laid out all of mine on some wax paper because my parents live in the middle of nowhere and don't have newspaper lying around. Lay the top piece of fabric with the stencil on your surface (remember we cut out two pieces). You don't want the paint leaking through to the back piece of fabric. Now you want to whip out your fabric paint. I really prefer to use acrylic paint with textile medium because it doesn't require me to buy a ton of other paints. For more info on this and the stenciling process you can check out my stencil tutorial. Use a brush or sponge to paint on the fabric paint making sure to paint away from the stencil.
You can do more than one coat if you don't want to be able to see the fabric design underneath the paint. That would probably take around three coats. Make sure to let the paint dry between coats.
I personally prefer the one coat look with these sheets. After they are dry you will need to iron them again to set the paint and tackle the fact that they puffed up a bit because of the paint/paper combo.
Now here's the really important part! Don't go peeling your stencils off all willy nilly! We're going to use those as our guide to sew the pieces together this will ensure that all of our letters are centered and what not. So match your flags back up with their back pieces (wrong sides together) and run them through the sewing machine only stitching from one side to the other keeping the top open. You can stitch this closed, but there's no need to. You want to stitch right next to your stencil like this:
Now cut off the top using the template as a guide and trim off the sides cutting about a 1/4 inch away from the stitching using pinking shears or regular scissors. Now you can take the stencil off and see your beautifully stenciled flags! Note that I didn't follow those directions in the picture below! Do as I say not as I do :)
My mom will be horrified that I posted pictures of her stained ironing board! lol
Sandwich your flags in the proper order between the bias tape and pin in place leaving as much room as you want between flags. I left about a foot of bias tape before I started placing flags so I'd have something to hang it with. When you run out of bias tape, just overlap the new piece and keep going, unless you want to get all fancy and sew it together.
Sew everything together and you're done!!
I promise the most time consuming part of all of this is waiting for paint to dry.
This makes a pretty stinking big banner. Ours is going to hang from the top of the tent, so it will work fine. If you want to do a little math to figure out how big of a banner you need for your space, you can downsize the pattern before printing it to make the flags smaller.
Want your flags to say something different? Here's a template for you :)- Download Template with lines (.psd)
You can use photoshop to make your own saying. I used the font Coney Island for these at 350px font size.
Enjoy!! I'll of course post pictures of these after our wedding next week so you can see them in action :)
*Our wonderful photographer, Robyn from Juniper Photography, posted this little peek of our wedding photos last week. I am soo excited to see more of them :)*
