Make Your Own Bunting, In Six Easy Steps

To celebrate the launch of their new Upper Crust range of fancy pizzas, we teamed up with Crust Pizza to show you some simple, cheap and smart ways to Upper Crust your life! 

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Bunting for birthdays, bunting for your headboard, Christmas bunting, New Year bunting! Bunting for everything! Bunting everywhere!

Making it is quick and simple, and — most importantly — it looks impressive.

We asked Claire Ward and Courtney Johnson from Sydney and Melbourne’s Lonely Hunter design markets to teach us how to do it. The best part? No sewing required!

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BUNTING!

MATERIALS:

– Felt in your colours of choice

– Craft glue

– Cardboard

– Ribbon

– Scissors

– Pencil

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STEP ONE

Take a piece of cardboard and cut a simple triangle. Your triangle size will depend on how big you’d like your bunting to be; you can measure this out or free-hand it. This triangle will be the template you use to cut your felt.

Place your template on the felt. Take your scissors and cut around the triangle template. Your first flag is now done!

Repeat this process until you have the amount of flags you need for your bunting (which depends on how long you’d like your bunting to be). We went for 15 flags, which was roughly 3 metres in length.

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STEP TWO

Take a contrasting colour of felt, and trace your letters. Trace the letters backwards so they appear correctly when placed on your bunting.

Tip: cut the felt into smaller pieces to make the cutting process that much easier.

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STEP THREE

Carefully cut around your letters, until the word/s you would like to spell has been cut out.

(Bunting doesn’t need to have words on it; you can keep it simple if you’d like.)

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STEP FOUR

Now we’re making slits at the top of our flags, which we’ll feed our ribbon through.

Take your flag and fold the top over approximately 1 cm. Using your scissors, make two slits on the left hand side of the flag. The two slits should be approximately 1 cm apart.

Repeat this process on the right hand side.

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STEP FIVE

Grab your craft glue and squeeze enough to lightly cover the centre of your letters. Press your letter onto your flag, and repeat for all the others.

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STEP SIX

Once all of your letters are glued on, you’re ready to string your bunting together.

Lay our your flags in the order you want them to appear. Take your ribbon and feed through your slits until all your flags are on the ribbon, making sure you have a tail of at least 10 cms at each end to secure your bunting.

Ta-da! Your bunting is now complete.

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MINI BUNTING!

Cake bunting is a simple way to fancify a basic cake. It’s also a really easy way to match your cake with your overall decoration theme.

Again, there’s no sewing required — and you might even have all the bits and pieces you need lying around at home.

MATERIALS

–          Coloured paper

–          Skewers (the kind you buy for BBQs)

–          Glue stick

–          Scissors

–          Ruler

–          Pencil

–          String

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STEP ONE

Using a ruler, draw up a bunch of diamonds that will become your flags when folded over. We wanted triangles that were 3 cm wide and 4 cm long, so our diamonds were 3 cm at their widest point and 8 cm tall.

If you’re in a hurry you can also just draw up one and then use it as template to cut out the rest.

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STEP TWO

Cut out your diamonds and fold them in half, firmly scoring the edge (but don’t glue them yet!).

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STEP THREE

Lay out your string and start gluing and attaching your flags. Make sure you leave a tail of at least 10cm of string at either end.

You want your length of flags to be a little bit longer than the length of the cake, to allow for a nice droop when it’s all in place.

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STEP FOUR

Once all your flags are attached, tie your ends to the non-pointy end of the skewer. If you find the string is slipping, you can dab a little bit of glue on and leave it to dry.

If you’ve got time, make up a second string of flags in a contrasting colour for double bunting power. You can also cut out and glue on letters to personalise your crafty cake.

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And now will you just look at this cake table.

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Photography by Natasha Mulhall