Party Bunting

We are having a small party to celebrate Jacinta’s 2nd birthday this weekend. I can’t believe my little Cinta doll is going to be 2!! Wait, yes I can. The drama has definitely been pointing that direction.

In any case, I was looking for decoration ideas that would be both cute and frugal, and remembered seeing homemade bunting somewhere on the interwebs. Google produced a variety of different ways to tackle the project, and I settled on making some paper bunting hung on spare kite string we have had lying around. I don’t know where the kite string came from, but hey, it came in handy so I can’t complain.

First things first, I hung the string on the wall to see what length I would be working with, and cut it. I ended up with about 30 feet to cover the space I wanted, give or take a couple feet.

 

I wanted to maximize the 12 inch scrapbook paper I was using, so I decided to cut triangles that were 4 inches across the top. That gave me 10 triangles per sheet of paper. Using fancy maths, I deduced I would need about 60 triangles to get the spacing that I wanted (approximately 2 inches) when I hung them on the string.

I picked out 6 fun papers that went together reasonably well, then folded one in half like so. If your paper is directional, like stripes, make sure they are facing the direction you want when you fold!

Using our classiest ruler, I marked along one long edge at 2 inches, 6 inches and 10 inches, then along the other edge at 4 inches and 8 inches.

 

Then I connected the marks and cut along the lines. The triangles that were on the fold also needed to be cut apart.

 

Once I had all my papers cut, I folded the top down just a bit to make a space for the string.

Then I wondered how that remote for an old DVD player got in with my scrapbook supplies. The world may never know.

 

Then I turned on a movie and got back to folding. Fold fold fold!

Missed a step! I also clipped the corners where they overlapped in the front.

 

When the folding is done, it’s time to attach the pennants (because I decided in the last step that they had become pennants, not mere triangles anymore) to the string. But first I had to untangle my string, which was lying in a heap on the table instead of nicely wound around something. Don’t be like me. Your crafting will go faster.

 

Some people used glue to secure their pennants to their hanging medium, but I decided to go with tape because it seemed faster and less messy. I lined up a few pennants along the string and stuck on a piece of tape to hold the fold down. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

 

Taping instead of gluing gave me the ability to slide the pennants around on the string if I needed to change the spacing a bit, since the string was only strung through the fold, not attached to the paper. That came in handy around the corners and the apexes (apices?) of the curves, since my maths were only approximate and not exact.

 

And one party decoration down!

It’s hard to gauge exactly how much time I spent since I grabbed a bit of time here and there throughout the day, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours from start to finish. Maybe a little longer because I fiddled with the pennant spacing a little more than necessary. Perfectionism can be a hard burden to bear.

I have a few more fun decoration ideas, so we’ll see if they pan out this week.