Tag Archive for 'bunting'

Vintage Map Bunting

Published
by
robayre
on January 19, 2012
in Fun, General Update, Projects and life
. 3 Comments

 
For a couple of years I’ve told Matt about how I wanted to make our bedroom map and globe themed. I had some inexpensive, but current (dated) classroom maps hanging in our bedroom before we moved, but since moving we have done nothing style-wise to our bedroom. Knowing I’ve always wanted our bedroom to be maps, Matt surprised me with this beautiful, large map of the United States. This has finally encouraged and motivated us to start the ball rolling.


Tonight I made the above mini bunting garlands to hang across the top of the recess of our bay window. I used vintage maps from old school atlases, sometimes you can find them affordably on ebay. If you are interested in making some yourself, check out the tutorial of mine that I posted a few years ago.

And, I was just reminded by a customer, I put a little recycled paper garland in with all orders to my etsy shop :)

Giveaway!!!

Published
by
robayre
on September 20, 2010
in Cool Links, Coverage, General Update and etsy
. 2 Comments

I’m dropping in to share some GREAT news today :D

1.Claire from Bicoastally is going to be giving away one of my Bunting Stationery Sets (pictured above) AND a reproduction print to one person through her blog. Visit this post to enter (it’s really simple, and you have 3 chances to enter. Subscribe to her blog, add my facebook fanpage, AND/OR tweet or blog about the giveaway to promote it, then comment about how you entered, on her post here.) Claire is such a sweet-heart and was the person who brilliantly gave me the idea to turn my bunting notepads into a stationery set. So hop on over to her blog and enter to win!

2. Last week was a trip. First my bunting notepads were featured in an Etsy article by themogulmom. That was pretty exciting, and garnered lots of hearts and attention to my shop. After being open for 4 years, my Etsy shop finally reached 1000 shop hearts. This was a goal of mine from the beginning of the year. Then that same article was used in an Etsy Sellers email, where my notepads were featured top and center. Woah! This was my first time being featured in an Etsy email and I was so honored and so excited. That feature resulted in a handful of sales! I had over 10 sales in one week, and that is HUGE for someone who usually averages 1-2 sales per week. I got a mini taste of what it would be like to run Robayre as a full time business, and that was a delicious taste, mmm.

Thank you for letting me dork out about my good news.

Day Fourteen - Bunting Flag Stationery Set

Published
by
robayre
on August 23, 2010
in General Update, Projects and etsy
. 1 Comment

On Friday I got a message from someone through Etsy inquiring if I could make my bunting notepads larger. She wanted to use them as stationery actually, so I didn’t need to pad them. Then she asked me if I had envelopes as well. It was funny because it had not even occurred to me to even make such a thing, even though one of my best selling items is my recycled stationery sets. I’m so excited about making this custom set that I plan on offering them as another regular item in my shop. They will listed for a few dollars more than the recycled sets because the paper used for these envelopes aren’t recycled, but will probably be made up of mostly art, scrapbooking and high quality patterned papers (think: Paper-source).

I think I’ll also list some larger pads (5.5×8.5″) just because I’m having fun padding :)

Day Six - Bunting flags and Camping

Published
by
robayre
on August 13, 2010
in General Update and life
. 1 Comment

It may seem I dropped off the face of the earth with my daily project this month, but I’m still here. I was actually on vacation.

We went camping with some of our best friends. It’s a trip we’ve been talking about taking for YEARS and YEARS. After plenty of research our friend Nikki found a great place for us in Wisconsin to go camping/floating. The idea was that we wanted to find a place that rents giant inner-tubes and then shuttles you to a drop off location and you lazily float back to camp. It was an awesome vacation.

Would you believe that I took 3 cameras, 2 of them being film, and the third digital, and I didn’t take one digital picture the whole trip. So, normally I’d have pictures to show here, but for now, nothing.

Nikki chose perfectly. Our campsite was right on the beach. We drove a bit over 4 hours north to get there but once I saw how close we were to the beach I once again found more support for my whole theory that “Any amount of hard work pays off as long as my feet end up in sand and water.” The first evening, after the long drive, we all stuck our folding chairs in the shallow edge of the sand and sat, drank and chatted with our tootsies in the water. When we woke up the first morning the first thing I did was run straight into the water (about 10-15 steps away from our tent). We took floating trips 4 times, 3 of those being long trips over 2.5 hours in length. It was so much fun to just float along, relaxed, tethered together with great company. Our friends even brought their pooch, Monty, who wore a mini life preserver and was a huge hit with other floaters.

Of course the mosquitoes were out of control, I got crazy grease burns on my legs while cooking on our campfire, we thought our campsite was going to wash away during a crazy thunderstorm during the middle of the night, and despite the sunscreen I still turned quite red. Still, we had a great time, and definitely plan on going back again next year. Hopefully next time the mosquitoes aren’t as bad, but I’m not holding my breath. After all, I think they are the Wisconsin state pest. Within a half hour I killed over 30 mosquitoes in the bathroom and shower alone. FYI, flip flops work wonders as a fly swatter.

Back to creating daily. Before leaving for our trip I created a couple flag garlands (pictured at the top of this post), thinking I would use them to decorate our camp site, but we didn’t have a tree to our site! It was truly a beachy site. So, now I have these buntings that I created. I used this same method as this tutorial of mine from earlier this year. Once I find something fun to do with them, I will share.

I’ll hopefully be back shortly with more projects for the August Challenge.

Tiny Paper Bunting Tutorial

Published
by
robayre
on June 19, 2010
in General Update
. 3 Comments

It seems that bunting and banner flags have become very trendy. I think it’s because you can’t help but be happy when you see them.

Check out these amazing necklaces on Etsy

 
by seller Scoutholiday                by seller stripeymonkey

Happy now, right?

Earlier this year you might recall my mini flag tutorial from here. Now I’m back with another quick bunting tutorial. If you thought that other one was quick and simple, don’t blink. The results are so sweet that I don’t want you to miss out. These flag garlands are even smaller yet, and we all know things get even cuter when miniaturized.

Materials:
diamond paper punch
paper (scratch paper, junk mail, magazines, patterned or colored papers, etc.)
glue stick
string

Step one: punch

Step two: fold them in half

Step three: glue

Voila! Mini bunting that can go anywhere. Hang it with magnets on your fridge or with thumbtacks on your bulletin board. Hang it across the top of your imac, or just above your monitor at work to make you happy. Hang it across a picture frame like I did here. If I had a car I’d be tempted to drape one across the length of the rear view mirror ;)

Have fun getting your bunting on!

Holiday Bunting tutorial

Published
by
robayre
on January 24, 2010
in General Update and Projects
. 3 Comments

Here is a super quick and easy tutorial to make a very adorable festive decoration of flag bunting, sewing machine free.

The other day when I was taking product pictures for the Valentine’s Day yoyo set and I made a super mini flag garland to hang from the shadowbox frame and it got me thinking about these. I made a ton of these before I opened my Etsy shop, back in the day and I thought I had already shared them here on the Inspiration Junkie before, but it must have been on my old blog. They are easy enough to make so I thought I’d share it with you. I’ve seen flag garlands often enough on crafty blogs, but most often they are done with all fabric and require sewing. This method is just as quick, just as cute and only requires the few items shown below.

1. Fabric. I’ve chosen solid and striped red fabics for the purpose of this post, but you can use whichever fabric colors you want. I used to make these garlands using one piece of fabric from my entire stash for variety.

2. Cut out a cardboard template of a triangle. The height of the triangle was 3 inches. As you can see I nip off the top points of the triangles so that I can fold over the edges easily. The resulting final triangle will then be about 2.5 inches tall. You could make your triangles larger or smaller depending on your preference.

3. A pen, to trace the template onto the fabric. If you have a water soluble or disappearing ink fabric pen, wonderful, but as you can see here I opted for a sharpie just because it was close by.

4. Scissors.

5. Glue gun

6. String. I use this embroider (?) string just because it’s sturdier than thread, but not as expensive as embroider floss. But, use whatever you’d like.

Start by plugging in your glue gun. This project is a very quick one, and by the time you get to gluing, the gun should be warmed up.

Trace out your template onto the fabric. You can maximize your  use of fabric if the finished traced template triangle alternate pointing up and then pointing down.

Cut the the traced templates out of the fabric.  You can reduce the amount of cutting if you trace your templates right next to each other, so that you can cut 2 edges with one snip.

Next, I lightly score the edge of the fabric with my fingernail so that the fabric folds over easy. Bend where the corners have been nipped off. You use that line to decide where to fold the fabric, plus now the folded over edge can’t be seen from the front.

Using the glue gun, draw a thin line across the folded edge. The next few steps need to be done rapidly while the glue remains hot.

Leaving about 6-12 inches of string empty on the end, place the string right on the glue.

Fold over the fabric and crease the edge, glue and string together.

Alternating fabric and leaving as much string as you want between each flag. You may want to put the flags immediately touching each other or keep an inch of fabric between, as I have done. Glue the rest of the flags onto the string. Make sure that you keep the back and fronts of the fabric consistent so that once the garland is complete you don’t have some fabics showing the front while others show the back with the crease.

Keep alternating until desired length. Leave a bit of extra empty string on each end to use later for hanging. The edges of the fabric are left entirely raw and with my experience this is never a problem because it is used just for decoration so there is no reason the edges should fray or fraying will be minimal. You might elect to iron out any wrinkles in the fabric, but just make sure to keep iron away from the glued edge of each flag because you don’t want to melt the glue onto your iron.

Voila!  An adorable bunting for you to hang just about anywhere.

And just for fun, I’ve added this particular garland, which is 6.5 feet of mini flags, to my Etsy shop, if you’d be interested in purchasing it.