The project is complete!
- Celebrate /Happy birthday banner
Background – Used my 12″ square up ruler to cut my triangles. This gave a triangle that was 1 6″ across the top. (I’m sure there is a fancy math name for that side of the angle….) I made 3 4 triangles out of 2 fabrics. I chose my letters from the skiptomylou.org website. I chose the triangle size based on the size of the letters.
Project process:
Each of the triangles has medium weight fusible (Pellon # 808 craft fuse) iron on backing. This gives the quilting cotton fabric stiffness. The letters were appliquéd on, also using a fusible product, Wonder Under. I traced my letters onto the fusible product in a mirror image, then ironed the sheet of wonder-under to the back of my fabric, and cut the letters out. Cool trick I learned from my quilt friend Barbara; I took my clear acrylic table for my Janome, put a small LED OTT LITE under it, and used it as a light box. Made tracing the letters quite easy. (Did have a couple of “do-over” when I forgot to mirror image the letter. Doesn’t matter with the I or the T, but certainly would matter if I ended up with a backwards R or B !! After I ironed the letter on the triangles, I top stitched using an appliqué stitch on my Janome. I have a Janome 8900 and used stitch 47 and stitch 51. When I did the CELEBRATE (in the brown circles) I used the standard settings; which was 4.0 width. After reading my Wendy’s bog I adjusted the setting to a much narrower width. So, the Happy Birthday stitched out at 2.0.
I cut 9 strips of fabric 3.5″ wide for the binding & ties. I folded the edges to the center making my own “double fold” binding. I overlapped the triangle points (using my 8.5″ ruler between the triangles) to “shorten” the overall length of the bunting. (17 triangles x 16″ is 22.6 feet of bunting!). As it is, the bunting, without ties is 206″ long —- 17 feet! I put longer ties on the ends, and added 3 additional sets of ties across the top of the bunting. If they aren’t needed, they can be “tied in a bow” at the top of the bunting.
This was a fun project to make. I had to engage the brain when I was thinking about the layout of the letters. I originally laid the letters out on a spreadsheet, and played with the spacing etc. Having a chance to “sleep on it”, I came out to the sewing room and re-arranged the letters for the “back side”. Had I done it the way I had originally planned, the letters on the back side would have spelled out ETARBELEC….not CELEBRATE. Glad I slept on that thought!
All in all it was a fun project. DO-OVERS: Keep it simple and don’t try to do a reversible. The original concept was CELEBRATE – 9 letters; 9 triangles. Because I went a little nuts, and decided to do HAPPY BIRTHDAY on the back, we ended up with 17 triangles. I hope wherever my daughter lives in the future, she has room for a GIANT bunting. It looks pretty good on my porch! So, time to pack it in a box and ship it out! Middle grandchild has a birthday soon…so there may be some use for it. Luckily, it stores pretty flat and doesn’t take up a lot of room in between birthdays and other times of celebration.
This is wonderful and looks so great on that beautiful wraparound porch.
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Thanks Lillian. It was a lot of fun to make. I like the challenge involved from concept to finish. I have lots of thoughts of how I would do it “differently” next time. It also gave me ideas for my porch!!
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Great bunting Mary. Looks fantastic. Well done.
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Thank you Lucie. Not a quilt, but a nice diversion between projects.
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Wow! You did such a great job on this. And having it reversible with the two messages is really smart. They will get so much use out of it! I love it!
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Thanks Deborah. When we chose the fabric, we were careful not to pick a particular “holiday” or ” season”, or “gender” so it could be used for any type of party.
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Definitely! In fact, these fabrics simply cry out “festive.” 🙂
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The back story is my daughter suggested a color scheme “similar to her shower curtain”…which is where the stripes choice came from. The polka dots were part of the same fabric line, and made it a good match. They are festive. Thanks for visiting my blog.
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What a thrill it will be to get that out for a family celebration for years to come. 🙂
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