Sturdy No Sew Painted Burlap Bunting Tutorial

If you've been stalking wedding blogs like I have you've seen the famous burlap wedding bunting. I loooove the bunting, it is one of those tiny details not everyone will notice/remember/care about, but I really want it!

Now, before you get all Mason Jar Manifesto on me, I'd like to point out a few things about our wedding:


Yes, my wedding venue has firefly lights. Six years ago, when I walked in to my venue as a sophomore in college trying to plan my sorority's formal, I saw the lights being put up for the first time. I immediately said, "I can't have my formal here, I'm getting married here" and walked out. 

Yes, my wedding is going to have mason jars. I saw them decorating a restaurant on a special dinner date turned crazy adventure with AJ and without skipping a beat turned to him and said, "That will be the theme for our wedding", not even knowing they were the new "it" thing.
Yes, there will be hay bales at my wedding. I'm getting married in October, and that's what my wedding venue uses to decorate. Guess what, my mom had hay bales at her October wedding in 1983, no one wrote a manifesto against her!
Yes, I'm doing almost all of the decor myself. I understand that this is a party celebrating our wedding, and the real important focus of the day is that AJ and I are getting married in a lovely ceremony before anyone even sees my DIY projects (well, except the save the dates and invites...). But I like doing crafty things. And AJ likes that I'm happy when I do crafty things. So my wedding will be full of lots of hand made rustic details, because that is very us. 


End rant.


So back to the bunting. As I said, I love it. You can find it all over Etsy. But, its expensive, and we will be having lots of bunting (Mr. & Mrs. for the sweetheart table, Love is Sweet for the cake table, Just Married for the pictures...if I can think of another phrase to bunt, I will!)

Instead, I took my Jo-Ann's coupons and headed out to buy some burlap. And buy some burlap I did. It was so inexpensive that I got 10 yards in three different colors - traditional brown, white/cream and light green!

Once I got home though, I was STUCK! I didn't know how to make a bunting. And all of the tutorials I could find just didn't fit the vision in my head.

I tried just cutting the burlap out into triangle shapes. I don't recommend this. It got all wonky and I had to back it with card stock to make it stay in triangle shapes. Although, I don't think the finished result is bad, I'd like to avoid the card stock because it takes away the fabric element.

Card stock backed bunting!

I went back, looked at some tutorials and I tried again. This tutorial had used felt and something called Heat Bond. While I didn't want any felt showing around the edges, I thought I could take the basic premise and make something out of it!

This is my No Sew Painted Burlap Bunting Tutorial

Materials:

• Burlap
• Neutral colored felt
• Marker
• Stitch Wizard No Sew Fusible Bonding (or any fusible bonding I assume)
• Iron
• Ironing Board
• Kitchen Towel
• Acrylic Paint
• Sponge Paint Brush
• Twine
• Stencil
• Hot Glue Gun

Time: 1 hour active, 8 hours drying time

Step 1
Cut out a tracer pennant. Now, you can do this out of paper, but I make banners a lot, so I know what measurements I like to use, so I did this with my felt. It saved me all of 5 minutes, but hey, that's my 5 minutes!

For this size: Take a 9" x 9" square. Mark a dot along the bottom of the square at 4.5". Draw a line connecting the top right corner to the dot. Repeat with the top left corner. Cut along the lines. Viola! A bunting.
For the 10-5-13 size seen above, I used a rectangle 7" x 9.5". Then, I marked a dot at 3.5" along the bottom, drew a line from the top right corner to the dot, top left corner to the dot then cut.
*This method can be used for any size measurements, just make sure the dot is centered along the bottom of the square/rectangle, draw your connecting lines and cut :)

Step 2
Trace your template onto felt. You will need to repeat this until you have enough. For this bunting, I needed 4 pieces, so I did this four times.

Step 3
Cut out all your felt triangles.

Step 4
Lay one felt triangle flat on your ironing board. Place a strip of Stitch Witchery along each side of the triangle.

Lay a piece of burlap on top of the felt triangle, being careful not to knock the strips off and to cover the entire triangle. Iron as directed on the package (mine required a damp towel to be placed on top of the fabric, which is what you see in the pictures).

Step 5
Cut out your pennant using the felt triangle as a guide.

The front will look like this when you are done.

Repeat until all of your triangles are cut out and you have a lovely little pile of burlap triangles with felt backing.

Step 6
Use your stencil to paint on the letters. If you are using a store bought stencil skip to Step 7. If you'd like to make your own stencil, see the directions below.

Cut out the letters you want to use out of poster board using a die cutting machine, or cut them by hand with an exacto knife. *Note, when I run poster board through my eClips, I set it on heavy weight card stock and tape the board to the cutting mat using painters tape, to avoid it lifting up.

Carefully remove the letter from the board, and leave just the negative. Cut out each negative to be your stencil, leaving enough room around the sides to protect the burlap from unwanted paint. Run the negative of the image through a Xyron machine loaded with temporary adhesive. Adhere the stencil to your burlap.

Step 7
Using the paint brush, sponge the paint over the stencil. Depending on the colors you are using, one coat may be enough (as in the green paint on white burlap 10-5-13 bunting above) or you may need two (like the white paint on green burlap banner I'm showing now!)

Step 8
Remove the stencils. Let the paint dry overnight, or at least for a few hours.

Step 9
Attach twine to the back of the bunting. Now, I realized after I made this that I could have put the twine in between the felt and the burlap way back in Step 4, but I didn't. So instead, the hot glue gun and I became friends. I assume you can also sew the twine on? That will remain an assumption on my part!

Step 10
Enjoy your bunting!

(Note: This photo was added on 5/24/12, after our engagement photo shoot. Credit for this photo belongs to Brooke of Brown Eyed Girl Photography. Please do not copy this image. Thank you!)

Did you/are you/would you have DIY stuff at your wedding?