So, us lucky Brits are having an extra day off this year thanks the the Diamond Jubilee of dear old Queenie. Go Queenie!

I, for one, am planning a Royal Garden Party to celebrate (much like we did last year for the Royal Wedding), and this is the first in a series of posts relating to it, so that we can all get excited, get crafty, and celebrate the Jubilee in style!

So the first things required for such an occasion are decorations, and the first thing up for making is that classic garden party decoration – Bunting.

It can be simple, it can be more complex, it can have a theme, or be made entirely from scraps of other things to give it a more random and colourful appearance.

For ideas, you may want to flick through this, but for this first lot, my inspiration came from my local fabric shop, which had some fantastic Union Jack print material that was ideal.

For any repeating pattern, the size of the bunting flags will depend on the pattern repeat. In this case, the size of each printed flag dictated the size of each bunting flag.

There are no set rules, I could have had rectangular flags and used the entire flag for each, however I wanted to have triangular flags, and so adapted their size to incorporate as much of the pattern as possible.

I also picked some plain fabrics in red, white, and blue, so I could have both plain and patterned flags all along the length.

Flags can be single thickness, hemmed or left natural, or double, hemmed and turned to give a nice defined edge, but for these flags… I went for something a little different, and used straight and zigzag stitch on each to give a decorative effect:

The flags were then sewn onto some folded fabric tape:

Now doesn’t that make you feel all patriotic?

P.S. the other bunting in the picture was made from a variety of different fabrics, I basically went into my local fabric shop and bought half a metre of all the fabrics I fancied…. which meant that the bunting ended up being over 30m long! I also used the fabric double thickness, hemmed and turned to give a nice neat edge: