Year of Bunting June Challenge: Bunting For Outdoors

June 14, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Year of Bunting June Challenge: Bunting For Outdoors

Welcome to the June challenge for the Year of Bunting!

May’s challenge was to make some bunting featuring flowers.

Hazel made some lovely bunting for her dresser with appliqued flowers. I was thinking about doing something similar to this myself, only I didn’t quite get around to it!

Julie made a floral bunting birthday card for her friend with scraps of pretty paper and floral washi tape. There’s a tutorial for her card on her blog here.

Liberty made some bunting with some treasures she found in the American equivalent of Poundland, and you can see what she made here on her blog.

If you entered, thank you. I love to see what you’ve made and it makes it fun!

June’s Challenge

This month the challenge is to make some bunting for outdoors.

From time to time, I make bunting to hang off the front of my house. I used to hang it between to brackets for hanging baskets, but a few years ago some clown decided to swing on one of the brackets and it came down. I still haven’t got round to putting it back up.

It also means that I haven’t made hanging baskets for a few years.

I think bunting is an acceptable alternative to hanging baskets, and it doesn’t need watering!

Also the front of my house is tatty, so I hope that the bunting serves as a distraction!

This time last year my insomnia was bad (it’s quite a lot better now), and I used a sleepless early morning to make this.

I wrote a post afterwards called The Easiest Bunting Tutorial because it was very easy!

I had some pretty cotton fabric left over from other things, so I chose some pink and blue and cut triangles.

Each flag was only one triangle. It was decent fabric so wouldn’t fray very much. I sewed it to a length of bias binding and tied it to the outside of my house.

It was every bit as cheery as my neighbours’ hanging baskets!

Making Bunting For Outdoors

Unless you live somewhere where you have glorious summers year after year, the weather needs to be taken into account when making for bunting for outdoors. You don’t want it to be so precious you have to run outside to retrieve it every time the skies open!

I’ve made mine from cotton and polycotton in the past. You could also consider:
Doilies (might be precious though!)
Net curtains
Tea towels
A duvet cover that’s seen better days
A plastic table cloth (my friend Wendy did this and hung it off her fence. It looked nice.)

You could sew the flags to bias binding like I did, or you could use twine or garden string.

Some Suggestions For Using Bunting Outside

Make some to decorate a patio or deck area.

Hang it off a fence.

Use some bunting to brighten up a little yard or children’s area in your garden.

If you’re lucky enough to have a big garden, string some between 2 trees. You could put a hammock there too (affiliate link)!

If you have a wreath on your door, you could make some bunting to match and hang it near your door.

For those of you who are campers, you could make some to hang on your tent. This is especially useful if you go to a festival or something and there are other people there with similar tents!

The challenge will run to the end of June. I’m hoping it will stop raining here for long enough so that I can hang some bunting up outdoors!

Hoping you’ll join in!

Year of Bunting Challenge 4: Bunting With Flowers

May 4, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Year of Bunting Challenge 4: Bunting With Flowers

I have a hard time deciding which is my favourite season, do you?

I like the autumn. Crispy leaves, golden light and woodsmoke.

Winter’s nice when you get a clear crisp day. When it’s horrible out, you can light the fire, make a cup of tea and snuggle up with your favourite humans and non humans.

When it’s summer you don’t have to bundle up in coats and you can go out and do stuff (not that you can’t in winter, but it’s more fun when you’re not cold!).

Spring’s lovely though. After the dead of winter, buds and green shoots are a reminder that hope springs eternal. By this time of year when there’s blossom on the trees, the days are longer and the weather is warmer, it’s enough to make your heart glad.

So May’s Year of Bunting challenge is to make flower themed bunting. You have until midnight BST on the 31st May. When you’ve made your bunting, either post a picture on Instagram using the hashtag #yearofbunting, or on the Tea and Sewing Machine Facebook page.

If you don’t do social media, you can email a picture instead at teaandasewingmachine@gmail.com.

There will a prize!

By the way, if you’re doing the previous challenge, that’s still going on. The last day is Sunday 12th May, so the two challenges are overlapping this month.

How you make your bunting is up to you. Here are some suggestions.

Flower Themed Bunting

Appliqued flowers. I made this a while ago with appliqued trees.

12 tips for making bunting 12 things to sew in the autumn bunting is best year of bunting challenge 4 bunting with flowers

Retro flowers are fairly easy as are made using simple shapes. I did this with this laptop sleeve and also with this dress I made. Machine embroidery could be added to the applique if you wanted to jazz it up a bit.

Flower quilt blocks. I was going to say that quilt blocks are usually square and you’d have to turn them into triangles, but you could keep them square if you wanted to! I’m not the bunting police :). If I was, I might fine people for not having any bunting, but not because the flags weren’t triangles!

Crocheted bunting with flowers at the centre. You could adapt a pattern for granny squares. There are plenty of flower themed ones on the internet, and I have several on my crochet Pinterest board. As with the quilt blocks, you could turn them into triangles or you could keep them as squares, it’s up to you!

Tulle or net flowers attached to the flags. You could make flowers like this, from net, tulle or even cotton or polycotton, then attach them to the bunting.

Flower embroidery. By machine or by hand!

Flowery fabric. I made this last year and hung it off the front of my house.

easiest bunting tutorial ever year of bunting challenge 4 bunting with flowers

Another option would be to choose something with a bold print and cut the triangles so that the flowers were at the centre of the flags.

You could even choose a bold floral print and embellish the flowers in some way, perhaps with embroidery or with shiny things. Nobody will be judged for using a glue gun!

You have until midnight BST on the 31st May to make your flower themed bunting. When you’ve made your bunting, either post a picture on Instagram using the hashtag #yearofbunting, or on the Tea and Sewing Machine Facebook page.

If you don’t do social media, you can email a picture instead at teaandasewingmachine@gmail.com.

There will a prize!

By the way, if you’re doing the previous challenge, that’s still going on. The last day is Sunday 12th May, so the two challenges are overlapping this month.

Please join in, it will be fun!

Ideas For Bunting Embroidery

March 20, 2019 · 1 Comment

Challenge 2 for 2019 The Year of Bunting is to sew some bunting embroidery. The post that explains the challenge is here.

If you or the people you live with don’t want bunting hanging up everywhere, or if you already have a lot hanging up, this is a nice, easy alternative.

It doesn’t take very long (once you’ve decided what to do of course!), and you can either make it part of a new project or add it to something you have already.

If you want to join in with the challenge but you don’t know where to start, here are some ideas for embroidery, some things you could embroider and some tips to make it all easier.

Ideas For Embroidery

It’s probably easiest to sew the outline of the bunting then embroider the flags as you like.

With this one I made patterns.

For this one I sewed sheep from French knots.

In this design, the flags are appliqued, then the flowers embroidered between the flags using woven wheels and lazy daisies.

Other things you could embroider onto the bunting flags include:
Trees
Hearts
Flowers
Letters
Or you could just pick your favourite embroidery stitches and use those to decorate the flags!

Ideas For Things to Embroider

The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to make anything new if you don’t want to. It’s easy enough to add some embroidery to something that you have already.

You could even buy plain white tea towels and embroider them yourself!

Here’s a list of things you might have already, or could buy ready made, that you could add embroidery to:
Towels
Face clothes
Tea towels
Jeans
Shirts
The hem of a dress
Canvas shoes
A canvas bag
A shower curtain
A babygro
Baby bibs
Hat, scarf and gloves
A baseball cap
Plain napkins
Pillowcases

If you wanted to make something for your bunting embroidery, here are some ideas:
A drawstring bag
A purse or pouch
A fabric basket
A peg bag
Some trousers or a skirt that you’ve made yourself
A needle case

Another option is to display your finished bunting embroidery in an embroidery hoop.

Tips For Making Things Easier

You might find it easier to draw your bunting on a piece of paper first, then transfer it to the fabric.

If drawing isn’t your thing, you could make one triangle as a template, then use that to draw the others.

Instead of embroidering onto the item, you could instead embroider a piece of ribbon or bias binding. You can get ribbon made of pretty much anything! You might choose to sew onto the silky stuff, but ribbon made from cotton or linen would work well.

Sewing the outline of the bunting with the sewing machine might be quicker. On the other hand, it’s easier to keep some hand sewing near you so you can work on it whenever you have a few minutes!

Year of Bunting Challenge 2

March 1, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Year of Bunting Challenge 2

Hurrah for the Year of Bunting!

It’s not really catching on, but it’s only March so I’m still hoping. In case you’ve missed it and you don’t have a clue what I’m on about, I announced at the beginning of the year that 2019 will be the Year of Bunting.

To make it fun, I’m setting challenges.

Challenge 1 was to make some bunting to decorate some furniture.

This is Hazel’s that she made to decorate her dresser. She found inspiration in the snowdrops in her garden.

Here is Christine’s bunting with her pretty crocheted flowers in between the flags.

They both won pincushion craft kits. Challenge 2 will have prizes too, so please have a go and enter!

I know that sometimes it’s offputting. You wonder what other people are doing, whether yours will be as good, whether there’s any point as hundreds of people will probably be entering and whether anybody will even notice yours.

I love seeing what you’ve made! This blog has some lovely loyal readers but it’s small and your contribution will be noticed :).

Challenge 2

So are you ready for the next challenge?

Challenge 2 is to sew some bunting embroidery.

I love this because it’s an easy way to sneak some in! Even if some soulless person in your house objects to you hanging up bunting everywhere, it’s much harder to object to a little bit embroidered on a tea towel and, let’s face it, there’s a good chance they won’t even notice!

This is some embroidered bunting I’m working on at the moment. I haven’t quite decided exactly what I’m going to do with it yet, but as I’ve managed to lose all my bank cards this week, I might be turning it into a new purse.

Exactly how you do your embroidered bunting is up to you. You can embroider by hand or use the sewing machine. It can be something functional, like a towel or a purse, or something purely decorative.

Here are some ideas of things you can embroider:

Tea towels
Dish cloths
Bathroom towels
Face cloths
A table cloth
Napkins
A top or a pair of trousers
Pillowcase or a duvet cover

There are some more ideas here on my bunting Pinterest board, and I have an embroidery board too.

The challenge will end at midnight GMT on Sunday 17th March 2019.

Please enter, it will be fun! And there will be prizes!