Bunting For The Shop

Colourful buntings are not just for parties and other festivities, but for kids’ rooms and craft areas, and of course Sentti & Tuuma! Keep reading for a link to the tutorial as well as our tips how to best make your own.

Free Pattern and Template

The pattern and downloadable template is to be found free of charge on the Simply Sewing (Gathered) website: How to make bunting. It’s a sister magazine to Love Patchwork and Quilting.

Our Tips

If you’ve never used templates before, print it at 100 % and cut the flag template out on the line.

• The PDF is paper size A4, so if your paper is US Letter, use that in the paper tray for output, but in printer settings let the printer think it’s printing on A4.

Step 4 is oddly described in the tutorial: Fold the fabric, right sides together. Place the template on the fabric. This way you’ll cut out both pieces at the same time.

• Use a ruler and rotary cutter to cut along the template edges.
• Or pin fabrics and template all together as described, then draw with pencil (if you don’t want to wing it) on the fabric around the template and cut fabrics with scissors.

If you placed the fabric right sides together when folding it double, once you’ve cut the flags out, you can immediately sew them together without extra fiddling.

• I find that fabric sticks to itself rather well and avoid pinning if at all possible, to save time and energy.
• When sewing the pieces, I used a 1/4″ seam allowance since that’s the usual presser foot on my machine. The wider the allowance, the smaller the flag.

Before turning outside out and inside in, I cut the seam allowances of the flag’s sharp point as small as I could around the lowest 3 cm / 2 inch or so.

• Don’t be afraid to cut close to the stitches because the less fabric bulk you leave there, the flatter and sharper the flag point will be.
• I have a chopstick I use to make points as pointy as possibly, when turning outside out.

For our bunting I used two pieces of very light beige bias tape (vinonauha, snedband) sewn together end to end (not 45° angle). White would have looked a bit prettier but it’s not very practical in terms of keeping it clean.

• I placed the flag half-way inside the bias tape, folded the tape and put Wonder Clips on, three per flag.
• With a quilting ruler I measured 4″ between flags and put one clip in that space to keep the tape folded in half still.
• If I make another bunting at some point, I might put the flags closer, 3″ perhaps. There are 16 fabrics, two of each rainbow colour (pink/technically not in the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue and violet), which makes ours rather long.
• Before sewing, I tucked the raw edge of the bias tape a few millimetres inside to close it.
• To secure the seams in each tape end, I sewed a few stitches, backstitched that amount, sewed again, backstitched and only then started sewing “for real”.

It is a rather quick project considering how much of an impact the bunting will have once done. You can use metric Skinny Quarters very well with this method, if you otherwise find them hard to use up.

All fabrics used in our bunting are Art Gallery Fabrics designs and still available in the shop, so have a look if you like!

Tell us, will you make a bunting with this tutorial and template?