Christmas Bunting

One of the many projects which has been keeping me more than a bit busy lately is Mum's Christmas bunting. We went to Spotlight a while back and she fell in love with some red and white bunting panels that were on sale. Of course I encouraged her to buy them seeing as they looked like a fairly easy project she could do while tending to our Old Nana.

She took them home and cut them out with a friend who proceeded to zigzag them together. Then next time Mum visited at my house she came with her large spotlight bag in tow... I knew exactly what she was going to say... Could I please stitch up the second set of bunting?

Mum showed me what had already been done and no disrespect to anyone but the first set of the bunting turned out a bit naff*. The triangles were zigzag stitched with wrong sides together and the edges looked really jagged... not at all how I think Mum had hoped they would when she purchased the material. So I set about making the second set of bunting. I unpinned all the pieces, turned them right sides together, stitched them and then turned them right ways out before pressing them into lovely neat little triangles. It took me ages to do them this way but I didn't say anything to Mum when I showed her what I had done. She said she did prefer the way I had sewn them and so I suggested that if she really liked my way better I'd be happy to resew the first set if she unpicked them.

A week later and Mum had managed to unpick just 6 flags... I couldn't believe I was saying it as I heard the words roll out of my mouth... but somehow I managed to return home with all the flags to unpick. I guess that means Mum raised me so well that I would do something I really do not like doing just to see her happy and that I really adore my her too.

I stacked the triangles of fabric into bundles of 5 to make the job seem a bit more manageable. After many hours of seam ripping I got them all unpicked and slowly began to restitch the flags.

Actually I think they turned out pretty nicely even though they took forever to make. Even so, I think next time someone sees nice bunting panels at the store I'm going to whistle and walk (no run!) away.

Here is the first set. It is about 5 metres long and has 20 flags on it. Only 3 more sets to go...

*naff: British slang, today meaning uncool, tacky, unfashionable, worthless... or as a softer expletive, in places where one might use the ["F word"] as in "naff off", "naff all", "naffing about".