A crochet garden bunting experiment

The world has gone crochet crazy, bunting crazy and now mandala crazy. More about mandalas soon but this weekend I decided to see if I could make some crochet bunting for the garden. The crochet part would be fairly easy, but lots of possibilities. The question was whether the bunting would survive outside for long enough to make it worthwhile doing.

This last weekend I decided to do the patio pots for my garden. I have quite a big patio, which makes me very happy and I know I am lucky to have a garden and a nice outside space. But it looks bare without pots. I always used to do the patio pots with my mum. Even in her 80s she was very fit and active and loved doing the planting while I did the heavy work. She lived with me when she very poorly last year and I did the pots so that she could see them out of the window before she died in July. This summer is the first without her and the first time I had to do the pots knowing that she wouldn’t be able not only to help, but to enjoy them. But she would also be scolding me for having a messy patio, so decided that back pain and physical tiredness would be a good antidote to the heartache and lump-in-the-throat.

This is just a couple of pics to show how it turned out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spent 4 hours on Saturday and 5 hours on Sunday and was pleased but my back and arms knew I had been busy. Time for a bit of relaxation so I decided to do some crochet and garden bunting. I wanted to only spend an hour, create a short string of bunting and hang it outside to see how it does until next weekend. Then I am planning on spending quite a bit of the bank holiday doing crafting and if it looks OK, I want to make a couple of new bunting strings and add to it.

I started with some rough string and made a long chain. I then chose bits of Stylecraft DK wool that I had  left over and chose six different colours that would look bright and go with the blue trellis on the patio. It used to be dark brown but that green is very nice – a bit like duck egg blue. The string was a bit knobbly and very hard on the fingers.

I then started about 10 chains from one end and crocheted a simple granny-style triangle, putting a row of double crochet into the string. I then turned and did a row of trebles, 15 in all, in triplets with a chain space between them. I then did three trebles into each chain space to start the grannies – five triplets in all. Turning again I then decreased by doing three chains and missing a gap, so the next row reduced at both ends. That mean the second row had four triplets. Turning again I did the same thing to produce three triplets then two and then just one in the last row and tied off.

I did another triangle 15 chains further one and repeated until I had 6 pieces of crochet garden bunting in total. Just a few more chains with the string and then I tied off but left the ends to tie onto the fence.

The raw product looks a bit messy but a bit of primping with the weaving in needle and the iron worked wonders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The overall result looks very pleasing on the trellis and, so far, its been fine 🙂 But its only been two days and it hasn’t either rained or been strong sun yet. I’ll wait and see what happens to it – fading could happen or, worse still, when it gets wet, it might shrink. Shrunken bunting might not be a pretty sight.