We're fortunate enough to have a perfectly south-facing garden and a son born in the Summer. This tends to mean that we are able to utilise the garden for his parties and bedeck the trees and bushes with bunting and balloons.
(That's the theory anyway, but on his second birthday there was a near monsoon outside in south Wales, and his third was in a church hall because it had rained for the fortnight before and I wasn't taking any chances.)
However, one of the things that I adore in the Summer months is seeing brightly coloured bunting draped through trees, and although we have 50 metres of home-made Very Hungry Caterpillar bunting from his first birthday, I felt that we needed some new flags for his fourth birthday; a pirate-themed party.
I did some research and found a huge selection of red, white and black fabrics suitable for pirate bunting from a variety of online shops and Ikea.
More specifically the fabrics I bought were:
- red and white polka dots
- red and black stripes
- pirates skull and crossbones
- blue nautical flags
- plain red
- red and white stripes, black and white stripes both from Ikea
Using this Pirate Bunting template, I traced out the triangles of fabric and cut them out using pinking shears (prevents the edges from fraying and saves time on stitching them too). For each 5 metre length of ribbon, I had nine different fabrics and used three of each. I laid them out in a pattern which meant there was a good contrast of red, white and black, along with alternating patterns and stripes.
Next job was to pin them on to the ribbon. I used 5 metre lengths to make it more manageable with sewing and untaggling, and had a 15cm strip of ribbon free at either end for tying onto the tree or fence post. I left a 1cm gap in between the triangles and pinned three complete repetitions along the 5 metre length. After pinning the triangles into place, I used the sewing machine with red thread to stitch them into place.
In total I made thirty metres of fabric to string around the garden for his pirate party, very jolly!
