party time

My son said to me yesterday, 'You're always making bunting, aren't you?'

That may be a slight exaggeration, but it is true that I've always believed bunting makes a party seem more of an occasion. In our old house, we often used to have street parties and barbeques, and for these I made literally hundreds of yards of bunting in cheerful orange, yellow and blue, which we used to string from the lamp posts.

Bunting definitely creates different moods depending on the colours of fabric used and the size of the flags. For our wedding we had delicate loops of fragile white paper garlands, and for new arrivals I like to make a little string of baby-sized bunting...

...special birthdays need it too.

We're celebrating another special birthday in our household later this month, so I wanted to make some outdoor bunting to decorate the front of the house and the garden. This time, I took my inspiration from a favourite painting which used to hang in the bedroom of a friend's cottage, of a Cornish seaside town festooned with flags in faded patterns of red, white and blue which always seemed to pull me into the picture, to dance up and down the streets with the naively painted sailors in their clogs and Breton sweaters.

It's made the lazy way, just two triangles straight stitched together and machined onto a length of bias binding. I had a lot of fun selecting the fabric, some of which is decades old now, old Liberty dresses from jumble sale hauls years and years ago. I'm pleased with how it's turned out, a sort of faded brightness that perfectly suits our slightly wild garden.

Some of the pieces are cut from an old embroidered tablecloth that we inherited from the lady whose house we rented as students.

The central panel is of single flowers, so delicate and beautiful.