Bunting is one of the friendliest first projects a sewing machine will ever meet. It's straight lines and triangles, nothing has to fit a body, and a wobbly seam disappears the moment the flags are strung across a room. A three-metre run takes an afternoon, most of which is ironing.
What follows is the whole job in order: choosing fabric that behaves, cutting consistent triangles, sewing the flags, and hiding every raw edge inside bias tape. Where there's a choice between fast and forgiving, this guide takes the forgiving route.
Quilting cotton is the safest bet. It's stable, presses crisply and doesn't squirm under the needle. Lightweight canvas, poplin and cotton lawn work well too, and old cotton shirts cut apart at the seams give a nice scrappy look. Leave knits on the shelf — they curl and stretch — along with satin, chiffon and heavy upholstery fabric, which makes flags hang like roof tiles.
Decide early whether your flags will be single or double sided. Double sided means two triangles sewn right sides together, turned and pressed, so the seams are enclosed and the back of the fabric is hidden. Single layer is one triangle with pinked edges: faster, and pleasantly homemade, but not as polished.
For a three-metre run, with flags about 15cm wide along the top and spaced roughly 6cm apart, you'll need 12 to 15 of them. A fat quarter of quilting cotton yields roughly four to six triangles depending on how you nest them, so three or four fat quarters covers this comfortably. Mix one large-scale print, two smaller ones and a solid.
Wash, dry and press everything before you cut. Cotton shrinks, and fabric straight off the bolt holds creases that throw triangles out of shape.
Make your template first: 15cm across the top, 21cm down to the point, straight sides, cut from card. Draw an arrow pointing to the top edge. That's the edge that goes inside the tape, and it needs to be a clean straight cut.
Fold your fabric in half with right sides together and cut two triangles at a time, nesting them point up, point down along the width to waste less cloth. Cut every flag before you sew any of them, so the prints stay evenly mixed. If you're making single-layer flags, cut the two long sides with pinking shears to slow down fraying.
Take two triangles, right sides together, and pin along the long sides, matching the top corners and the point. Sew a 1cm seam down one side, around the point and back up the other, leaving the top edge open.
Then trim. Cut the seam allowance at the point down to about 5mm and snip straight across the very tip, a couple of millimetres from the stitching. That's the difference between a sharp point and a blunt lump. Don't cut the stitches.
Turn the flag right side out and push the point out with a chopstick or the blunt end of a pencil — ease it, don't stab it. Press flat, working the seams out to the edges.
Sew all the flags one after another without cutting the thread between them, then snip them apart and press the pile in one go. Far quicker than stopping and starting fifteen times.
Packaged double-fold bias tape has a wide half and a narrow half. Put the narrow half on the front, so when you stitch near the tape's lower edge you're stitching through the wider back and can be confident of catching it.
If you miss the back in a few places, don't unpick the lot. Turn the bunting over and stitch a second line along the back, just inside the tape edge. Two lines look deliberate and hold beautifully.
To skip bias tape, cut a 6cm strip of the same fabric — straight grain is fine, since bunting hangs almost straight. Lay your flags right side up along one edge, spaced evenly with raw edges aligned, and sew a 1cm seam. Fold the strip over to the back, press, then topstitch along the fold. Slower, but very forgiving.
With two-sided flags the seams end up inside the flag, so there's nothing to finish there. Your effort goes elsewhere.
Hold the run up by one end and let it fall. Check that no flags are twisted, that the spacing is even, and that none slipped out of the tape while you stitched. Press the tape flat one last time.
Hang it from hooks or a length of string between two points, and tie the tape ends rather than pinning them. Bring it in if it rains — cotton dyes fade and damp flags droop. To wash it, put the whole run in a net bag or pillowcase, wash cool and gentle, and air dry. Store it rolled around a cardboard tube rather than folded, ready to go straight back up.
Photo: Neil Yonamine / Pexels
