Making Stripey Bunting

One of the downsides about blogging about your craft projects is that as well as having a record of all the stuff you've made, you also have a record of all the stuff you never finished and just how long ago it was that you last picked up the thread / yarn / fabric etc and worked on that project that you were definitely going to finish that weekend / that month / by the end of the year. Time, it flies and WIPs they gather dust.

I've got quite a few projects in progress at the moment but most of them involve a bit more brainpower than I've had in the evenings lately. I've been crashing in front of the TV each evening but have still found myself wanting something really simple to work on to keep my hands busy. After years of crafting while watching the telly it just feels weird not doing so!

So I had a look in my WIP stash and dug out these old stripey fabric panels I made back when I was still at school and which I last blogged about TWO YEARS AGO (argh) ... when I was totally going to use them to make something new but instead just put them back in the box they came from and did nothing with them. Tsk tsk.

It's not even as if I'd not decided what I was going to use them for! Thanks to a suggestion in the comments I'd decided to chop them up to make some stripey bunting but had then done nothing whatsoever about the chopping or the making.

So... a mere two years later, yesterday I made a paper template and got pinning and cutting and ended up with 10 large stripey triangles (6 blue, 4 pink) and 10 felt triangles to match.

Here are 6 of them:

And here are the leftover scraps - I'll be salvaging some of the beads and other embellishments from these. Waste not want not!

 

I'd thought about folding over the edges of the fabric, then backing them with felt but because of the thickness of some of the stripes (lines of felt, thick cord, etc) that was going to be a bit tricky and would have meant smaller finished triangles and fewer stripes / less detail on each triangle.

So instead I'm just leaving the edges as they are and securing them to the backing felt with blanket stitch. If they fray a bit, so what? 

I'm using embroidery thread for the blanket stitches, which looks rather lovely.

Slowly stitching all these edges is just the sort of sleepy evening task I need at the moment and with a bit of luck I'll have them all finished before another two years roll round.