Tutorial: 4th of July Chain Bunting

I had leftover handtowels from the dollar store, and a whole house left to decorate, so I kept on going with my festive crafting. I had all this fabric, so I thought about what I could sew, and thought immediately of a pennant bunting. But living on the internet as I do, those are starting to seem tiresome. Everybody loves pennants, everybody does pennants. What’s next. I don’t know about the rest of the internet, but for me it’s the paper chains of my childhood.

Since I was using a handtowel, I just cut a strip across. Measurements really don’t matter here, and what I ended up using was totally determined by what I happened to have in front of me. But I’d guess the strips were 15″ long and 2 1/2″ wide.

Then you’ll need to sew the strips into a tube. If you’ve ever sewn a handle for anything you’ve already got this step down. Just line up the long edges with the fabric right side together, and sew a straight line 1/4″ in from the edge. Turn the tube right side out and then iron flat. I like to iron it so that the seam runs down the middle.

Push in the end of one side. Take a minute with this to get it to lie nice and neatly, it will pay off in the next step.

Bring the other edge around and stuff it inside the turned down side. Secure with a little hot glue. You could sew it if you wanted to, but I found the hot glue to be so so so much easier.

Repeat this process over and over and over again. Just make sure that before you glue the next ring closed, you wrap it around the ring that came before it.

I used to make paper chains to count down for every good thing. For school to start and school to end, to count down to my birthday, even to count down to my wedding day. These chains won’t be removable, but they’ll still remind me of how much fun the anticipation was. And save me a lot of work from one holiday to the next.