The Great Bunting Barter

I keep meaning to get a project finished and written about every two weeks - that's my goal.  But other things keep getting in the way, like thwarting the escape artist

and admiring the spring that has finally, finally sprung

and digesting the craziness that first terrorized and then united this city I've come to call home.

But with May around the corner, I'm trying to get back on track and stop letting myself get distracted by all the things floating around my head!

I don't think I could ever craft for money, because

1. my technique is pretty crappy (the result of my disinterest in practice);

2.  I don't like doing the same project more than once;

3.  when people say "wow you could make those and sell them for like $20 a piece!" I'm thinking wow, that would earn me roughly $1.20 per hour.

But a friend who is getting married next weekend wanted some bunting for her wedding and suggested a barter.  Which is fun, considering she wanted something almost as old-fashioned as that word.  So bunting for babysitting it was!  Now, if I'd really thought ahead I would have had her babysit

while

I sewed, but you can't exactly ask someone to take off work the week before their wedding to babysit - lessons learned for next time.

Miss K wanted something a little old-fashioned in a creamy/white or muted pastels color palette.  Like Jane Austen meets Anthropologie.   So she picked out these lovely fabrics as a base (we lost our camera, but hopefully an iphone and bad lighting can still convey the idea):

I've got a stash of old square ivory linen tablecloths from the grandmothers, some of which are rust-stained, so this seemed a perfect opportunity to put one of those to use.

A couple of years ago I started collecting little old embroidered hankies.  My mom gave me my first, at my wedding, and it was just such a sweet and useful thing to have when you wear mascara and think you might cry.  As it turns out, these guys regularly make it into the thrift shop at my mom's retirement home, so I get a package of pretties a couple of times a year.  I've thought about appliqueing them to pillowcases, making quilt squares out of them, sewing them together into a kitchen curtain.  But they're so old and delicate, and the thought of putting them together into one project always seemed like it would take away from the uniqueness of each one.  So they stack up and stack up, and I remain confident that I will find a way to use them some day.

I love the simple white ones:

 And especially the ones with red or my favorite color combination red & purple:

This one I have set aside for the travel quilt I'm making J:

They seemed to be just the style we were going for with this bunting, and each one could star in its own flag, not patch-worked onto its neighbor on some bigger project.  So for some flags I just fused double sided fusible web onto the corner of a hankie and then appliqued it onto one of our base fabrics.

For other thin hankies with enough fabric to be their own flag, I fused a whole triangle to a plain white fabric to make it thick enough.

In the end I was really satisfied with the result.  And how fitting that these beautiful scraps of 50 year old fabric will be hanging at a wedding where two lovely and loving people will make promises to spend the next 50 together!