Bunting season is nearly upon us – an incipient royal wedding (with accompanying jingoism and jelly at street parties), a clutch of bank holidays and the next thing you know it’ll be summer and time for fairs, picnics and barbecues.

But you don’t need an excuse for bunting, really.

I like bunting. I’ve never really had a reason to string it outside, but my study (painted white) has a picture rail running around the top of the wall, and I had an idea to string some miniature bunting along it (and along the frames of a couple of pictures) as a sort of alternative decoration.

So I did a bit of online research (of course) and discovered that you can pay not very much for fairly ugly and cheap-looking big flappy strings of bunting. You can pay quite a lot for the fruits of someone else’s labour on etsy, folksy or ebay and the like. Or you can make it yourself.

Several of the methods I found require cutting things out with pinking shears (I don’t have any, and John Lewis were out of stock when I went in to check) and/or making shapes which you sew and turn inside-out (far too much faff).

So I decided to see if I could figure out a way to make simple no-sew, no cut shapes which would look good front and back, not fray on the edges and would have some structural integrity. I came up with his origami-inspired kite-shape approach.

It works!

You will need:

— Some material, cut into squares (about 30)
— 16mm bias binding tape (about 5m)
— Pins
— A sewing machine (could do it by hand, it’s not that hard or much)
— (optional: webbox)
— An iron + flat surface to press on

Total time to make: about two hours

Click through this set on Flickr to see step-by-step instructions with photos.

Let me know how you get on.