The Pennant Project

I am working with my friend Andrea to decorate a tent and two tables at a benefit next month at the Evergreen house museum. The theme for the party is Elsie De Wolfe’s Circus Ball and so we’re decorating our tables and tent to reflect that.

Our colour scheme is the always classic blue & white, and with that in mind, we started thinking about what we’d do, with me back in England and Andrea in China. She started a Pinterest board to come up with ideas, and settled on decorating the tent with dozens of pennants as well as blue and white china, tablecloths and napkins. We decided to use pink as the accent colour.

Luckily, I’ve got quite the stash of fabrics, so pulled out all of the blue and white ones. Just in this picture are fabrics by Victoria Hagen, Ralph Lauren, Lilly Pulitzer, and Brunschwig & Fils.

Honestly, the smartest thing I did was buy a pinking blade for my rotary cutter. It made all the difference in the world and I didn’t spend hours cutting. I also made a template for the pennants.

Originally, I thought I had to make 120 of the pennants, but later found that 60 would suffice. But since I’d already cut out about 100, I decided that we’d find a way to use the others.

Because we’re hanging the pennants on a tent, I thought they needed to be double sided, and thought that a nice blue and white striped ticking fabric would be perfect for the reverse. I was getting ready to go to the fabric store when a yard sale sign caught my eye. So I stopped off and there was a bag with 10+ yards of blue and white striped ticking in a gorgeous chintz finish. The best thing about it was the price: $3.00! SCORE!

I zoomed home and started cutting out the pennants to see how they’d look with the stripes on one side and the prints on the other.

Then I had to calculate how many pennants per side of the tent, which I mistakenly thought was 15x15 feet, but in reality is 10x20 feet. So I measured off 15 feet on my clothesline, so I could eyeball what they’d look like and figure out the spacing. (This was before I added the ticking backs.)

The pennants are about 10 inches wide and 14 inches long. They’ll be big enough to make an impact, but not so big that they won’t flutter in the breeze.

We still have more details to work out, but I wanted to get a start on these and not be pressured to finish them at the last minute. Check back in a month to see how the final tent and tables look!