Neon Hand Painted Bunting

For Jamies year 6 graduation disco, I have volunteered for "decorations".

The budget is meagre (read non existent)....and its a big marquee......

Woo hoo...an excuse to bunt.

You cant really beat the triangle and string combo to fill a space cheaply.    The school has some plastic red white and blue plastic bunting that we could use....but HELLO!....think I would pass up an opportunity to add to the bunting population.  I dont think so.

Our colour scheme is neon and fluorescent..and as I mentioned before, there is a tiny budget for decorations, so to get the massive length and colour combo we need, and keeping within our costings, I am painting my own.

So how much to make?  Hmmm.....it depends upon the size of the marquee, and where/how we want to drape, as well as the size of triangles and gap in between.




I'm thinking there should be some kind of degree in buntology? Oxford, Cambridge?  Ok maybe not.


I'm not sure I've ever applied this much thought to bunting before....just made until I got bored, and put it up wherever it fitted.

Our marquee will be 9m wide, and 24m long (8 x 3m sections).

At first I thought I would do round the outside, plus an asymmetric criss cross design into the middle and back on both sides.....A quick doodle, and calculation....102m of bunting would be needed....Holy Cow!  Even I dont love bunting that much.

So my revised plan is just to do criss cross in the middle.    It will give the impact, without bunting overload...

This works out at a slightly more manageable 50m of bunting.  This is what 50m of bunting looks like!




To make the bunting,   I am cutting up strips of canvas and painting them in the colour scheme.  Where possible,  using left over house paint from my basement.

The triangles are 15cm wide and approx 20cm deep.  I get between 19 and 20 per strip.  I will leave a 10cm gap between triangles...ie 4 triangles to a metre.

For the house paint triangles, I am adding some splashes of the neon to jazz it up in simple patterns....I would be more decorative if we werent making soooooo much.

Anyway, despite my waffling, the process is simple.....paint canvas in the colour you like.  Cut into triangles, sew into bunting.

To make it easier to put up and take down, I sewed metal hoops (like the inner bit of a ring divider file) onto the strings.

And there you go.  Meters and meters of bunting.

Here are some photos of the bunting up in the marquee.