Caroline has made this really cute Liberty Bunting using some of the lovely quilting cottons from Liberty. Liberty is great for making bunting – this is slightly thicker quilting cotton, but I’ve used many different Tana Lawn® Liberty fabrics too in the past. I asked Caroline about her project.
“Stuck at home on a weekend when one of my sons was self isolating, I agreed to make ‘a mini bunting kit’ we were developing at work. It was the first time for many years I have sewn something other than curtains, blinds or cushions, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.”
“When discussing with my father what his partner Maggie would like for her birthday, he said he thought she would love some bunting. The bunting they had was falling to pieces so this was a great idea. I asked Maggie to choose some fabrics she liked from our website and asked my father to think how long the bunting needed to be. He is building a new house and thought bunting would look good under one of the balconies.”
“Maggie chose a lovely fat quarter pack of quilting cottons in red and blues which had 11 different fabrics. When my father measured under the balcony he calculated I would need to make at least 30 metres of bunting! Wow – I was thinking more like 10 metres…”
You can take a look at a gorgeous selection of fabric bundles here to choose from for your own perfect Liberty bunting.
“A few weeks later I found I had to self isolate too, so that gave me the time to concentrate on the bunting. I set up a spare room as my office / sewing space and in between doing the Alice Caroline accounts I cracked on with the bunting. Given the length of bunting required, I knew I would need to make fairly large triangles, so I printed a template that was about 23cm long. This was too big to allow me to cut enough triangles out of each fat quarter, so I truncated my template when I made it in cardboard. This allowed me to neatly cut 10 triangles out of each fat quarter. Marking out the fabric, then cutting out the triangles, while time consuming, did not take as long as I thought and there was surprisingly little waste as I was able to tessellate the triangles.”
“I then set about the mammoth task of ironing and sewing the hems of the 110 triangles. I did them in colour batches, to save me changing threads too often on my machine and enjoyed watching the tennis at Wimbledon while I sewed. Once they were all sewn and trimmed, I was thankfully out of isolation. This meant that I could go and choose some bias binding to use – I decided on a lovely light blue that contrasted beautifully with a number of the fabrics. I laid out my finished triangles in piles by fabric type and then spent some time experimenting which ones looked good next to each other. Once I was happy with the order, I started from the middle of the biased binding and started pinning on the triangles in order, first one direction, then from the middle working backwards the other direction, so the pattern of fabrics is exactly repeated along the whole length of the bunting. Once all the triangles were pinned on, I then sewed them to the binding. The final stage was to fold over the binding and sew along the edge and then make the loops at the end for hanging.”
“Maggie was delighted with her present and is hoping that my father will have finished the house by the new year, so it can be hung.”
Thank you for sharing your gorgeous Liberty bunting with us. The quilting cotton works perfectly for a vibrant bunting that will hopefully last for years to come.
