Weddingbee Blog

When I first looked at our venue I envisioned paper lanterns. Lots of paper lanterns in different sizes and colours and fairy lights everywhere. I’d seen this picture on Style Me Pretty and immediately thought yeah…I want that.

Image via Style Me Pretty / Photograph by Tanja Lippert

I figured it would look awesome because of our high ceilings, and I really liked the idea of having a lot of bright colours up there instead of empty space.

Unfortunately, the more I looked into it, the more I realised how impractical it would be. We wouldn’t have an events company rigging it up—we’d have to do it ourselves, and we just didn’t have the equipment to be able to install them at that height.

I was pretty gutted—if we couldn’t come up with another idea to fill that space above us that we could do ourselves, then I would have to hire a company to install something for us, and that meant taking money from the budget out of another area.

But as luck would have it, I found another idea that was possible. Bunting.

Image via Theme Works Weddings

A lot of bunting.

Image via Theme Works Weddings

Five hundred meters of it, to be exact.

I knew that if I wanted to achieve this kind of look I’d either have to buy lots of bunting…or make it. Making it was definitely going to be the cheapest option, but it would be very time consuming.

Still, I made the decision that, with more time than money, I’d give making it a go.

I first started off by deciding what size I wanted my triangles to be —20 centimeters at the top with sides of 22 centimeters. Big enough to be seen from a distance (I want my work to be noticed!). At this size, with a just less than 20-centimeter gap between them would give me three triangles per one meter. Five hundred meters = …1,500 triangles…

Better get one with it, then!

I bought material at a cheap fabric shop in town and got 60-centimeter widths. I decided to go with a small amount of a lot of different patterns to give lots of splashes of colour.

I made a template of my triangles onto a card and then used it to draw strips. (The image isn’t very clear, but there are pen lines on each end of the triangle!) (The next lot of photos are all personal.)

Once I had my strips, I drew around my template to create the triangles. (Again, the image isn’t that clear so you have to look closely!)

Then I cut the strips (using straight scissors for this part) sat on the couch, put on a TV show (at the moment it’s White Collar on Netflix—Matt Bomer makes any task a lot more interesting), and cut out the triangles with pinking shears!

In three months I’ve cut out over 420 triangles—so over half of the 750 that I need to do! It’s not too bad, though. Each piece of fabric makes around 27 triangles, and I can do two to three in an hour or so. My mum and dad are helping with the other 750.

I have lots of colours in lots of different patterns. Most are from the fabric shop, but other bits have come from cheap pillowcases my mum found on eBay! Dad has even cut up a single bed sheet into triangles…legend.

It’s been pretty time intensive, but I’ve got into a good routine now. I take a few different sheets of material, draw them up, cut them into strips, and then cut them out all at once in an evening. I think the hardest part is going to be sewing them together!

We’ve yet to even buy the binding material, but I think we’re going to get all the cutting out of the way before embarking on the sewing journey!

What’s your most ambitious DIY project?