Materials: A half-yard each of five different cotton prints (though I only used a quarter yard of each, and could have used even less than that). Crazy gingham bias tape that I’ve had kicking around forever, and am pleased to have finally found a purpose for.

Time: A couple of hours.

Cost: Around $10 for the fabric.

Buntings — or pointy-type triangle-ish festive banners, whatever you want to call them — are well on their way to becoming the decorative cliché for children’s rooms of the 2010s, if they haven’t already officially claimed that title.

But the truth of the matter is that I have this room that needs something on the walls, and I’m too indecisive / lazy to have decided on art from Etsy. Also, this was a satisfyingly easy, cheap project requiring a minimum of fuss and fitting. I roughly followed this tutorial, though I ended up freehanding the shape of many of the triangles (which is, uh, evident in how some of them look curved and a little dropsical. I call that “character.”).

I knew that I’d have enough fabric to make a decently long bunting, so I was fine doing some improvising.  To be even more thrifty with your fabric, however, you could easily do this project and use muslin or scraps of other cotton for the backs of the triangles.

It helps that this was one of the first sewing projects that I’ve done since our move, and my sewing stuff is now set up in the guest room (with our former kitchen butcher block table acting as small cutting table).  And I have all this space to work in!  And I can even shut the door mid-project so the cats don’t walk all over everything!

With this decorative placeholder, the nursery itself is in a decent state. When we moved in, the walls were exactly the same light beige shade as the carpet, which was pretty soporific, so we got permission to paint them in a much more edgy and exciting shade of… gray. (Again, see: decorative clichés for children’s rooms of the 2010s.)  Pete and I have never bothered to paint any of our apartments before, so this felt like a Really, Really Big Deal.  It necessitated the purchase of brushes and official color approval and a big piece of plastic and everything, and we got to have one of those overly-serious conversations about twenty nearly-identical paint chip samples that you usually only see in the movies.

But I like it as a backdrop for our High IKEA-style decorating theme, so gray it stays.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011 at 11:50 am and is filed under diy, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.