Celebrate – Happy Birthday Bunting wrap up

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.