Thirty-Minute Almost-No-Sew Bandana Bunting

We had some friends over for Mexican food this past weekend, and I wanted to make a special decoration to make the house festive. In the past, I've bought papel de picado—those beautiful punched-paper flags—but they get faded and tattered very quickly (especially when you have kids who shoot them with Nerf bullets), and then they look sad and you feel bad wadding them up in the recycle bin. So I thought I'd make something almost as festive and much less expensive and more durable—a bandana bunting.



To make your own bunting, determine how many flags you want your bunting to have, divide by four, and purchase that number of bandanas in the colors of your choice. I wanted a 12-flag bunting so I bought three bandanas.

I had a very specific color scheme in mind—yellow, orange, green—and unfortunately my usual bandana source didn't have any of those colors, so I bought some instead at the craft store. They're not quite as nice of quality, either in color, the printing of the design, or the squareness of the bandana, but they served the purpose.



Step 1. Iron the bandanas.


Step 2. Cut them into quarters.

For each bandana you started with, you'll end up with four equal squares.



Step 3. Place a bandana square on the ironing board in front of you, wrong side up, and turn it 45 degrees so that the two finished sides come to a point at the bottom and the two cut sides come to a point at the top. Fold the finished sides toward the center and press.

Step 4. Open the sides back up and fold the top down even with the tops of the side folds and press (You could also cut the top off, but pressing seemed easier to me.)


Step 5. Fold the sides back in. Now you have a triangle.

Repeat with the remaining bandana squares. So far no sew.

Now comes the time to put your bunting together. This is the only sewing part, although you could use pins, fabric tape, or glue. Double-fold bias tape would be ideal for the string part of the bunting (what is that? garland?), so that you can fold it over the raw edge at the top of the each flag. The craft store did not have any bias tape so I bought ribbon instead (a 5-yard spool). I thought I might be able fold the ribbon, but it was too narrow. It occurred to me belatedly that I could have bought two ribbons, one for the front and one for the back to give it a more finished edge on the back side, but I think it's fine how it is. 

Step 5. Figure out how you want your flags spaced on the ribbon. I could probably have used math to do this, but instead I laid the ribbon out on the floor and lined the flags up in a pleasing arrangement. They ended up about 3 inches apart with about a foot-and-a-half or two feet of extra ribbon on each end. Pin flags in place and sew (or tape or glue).

A few guests requested recipes from the dishes I made. Almost everything came from Rick Bayless's Mexico—One Plate at a Time cookbook (including the gorgeous flan M made with my help—a first time making flan for both of us and it came out perfect). I found a couple of recipes on his web page:

Chipotle chicken salad tacos
Mexican-style zucchini tacos

One dish I did NOT use a recipe for was the cheese enchiladas—for those I just rolled up grated cheddar in corn tortillas, laid them in a baking dish, topped with a magic secret ingredient, sprinkled on more cheese and baked until melty and bubbly.

Me Weekend

First of all, I need to start off this post by stating that I love my husband and children very, very much. And yet, and yet...I spent most of the weekend completely free of them and it was absolutely divine.

It all started a few weeks ago when we decided to head up to Mt. Desert Island Columbus Day weekend to hang out with two other families and attend some of the Alumni Weekend festivities at C's and my alma mater.

A weekend with good friends, hiking and going out on a boat, visiting old haunts––sounded like so much fun. So why, every time I thought about it, did I feel like a thick leather belt was tightening around my chest?

Perhaps because, due to a summer of fun and busyness, visitors and travel, I was SO FAR BEHIND on my graduate school work, with October the busiest month of the semester, I felt if I went away for a weekend I would never, ever catch up.

So I asked my husband if he would very sweetly take the children and go away for the weekend of fun, leaving me behind to catch up on my work, and to have a bit of that solitude and quiet and just general head space required for generating ideas and inventing characters and carrying narrative lines through to a conclusion. I have been missing that space, craving it, and as the weekend approached, I felt like a giddiness rise in me, like a shaken-up bottle of soda-pop, every time I thought about it. And that giddiness stayed with me throughout the weekend, every time it occurred to me, "I am here, all by myself!"

After they had all left the house Saturday afternoon, after soccer games and packing flurries, it occurred to me that I have never once spent a night alone in this house (where we've lived for ten years now), and that possibly the last time I spent more than a few hours home alone was way back when I was pregnant with M (we were living in an apartment then) and C went to Florida for a week. I have been lucky enough to go away and stay with friends, in hotel rooms and even dorm rooms, but I've never actually been home alone (I have spent at least one full school-day at home completely alone, within blog memory).

It was every bit as wonderful as I expected. I got tons of writing done (finally got this month's packet done and in the mail today, only four days late, and revised a piece from first semester for one of my workshops, due at the end of the month), went for quiet walks in the woods (tons of mushrooms poking up from the earth), ate yummy food whenever I felt like it, read quite a bit of a book for my next packet. I even watched TV (which I hardly ever do) and slept in late Sunday morning (which I didn't even think I was capable of doing). I was so refreshed and rejuvenated and grateful to my brood that I cooked them up a big feast of chiles rellenos, beans, rice and tomato-jalapeno sauce for dinner upon their return last night. And they all survived just fine without me. Now if I can only convince them to go away on that big week-long fishing expedition I've been imagining for seven years...

Birthday Weekend

Because my birthday fell on a Monday this year, and because M would be at camp when it came, I planned to celebrate on Saturday, with a trip to the beach and to my favorite restaurant, El Camino.

Saturday started out gray and rainy, and I didn't feel all that well, so I spent the morning cleaning house ('cause doesn't that make everyone feel better?) and getting M all packed up for his week away.

Finally, after a late lunch, C finally motivated us all and we headed toward the beach in the late afternoon, gray skies and all.

When we got there, the sun peeked out of the clouds, and we remembered that gray days are pretty great days to go to the beach, because hardly anyone else is there, and you don't have to bother with annoying things like sunblock.

We also decided that Reid State Park has the best waves for body surfing.

Last week when we went to Popham with my niece, she and I swam out a bit, and then discovered that as hard as we tried to swim back toward shore, we weren't getting anywhere.

We finally broke through, but not without mentally writing the headlines, "Two former lifeguards swept out to sea." It turns out this was a rip current, and we should have tried to swim out of it, parallel to the beach, but since we were between two masses of rock, that might not have worked.

After a couple hours on the beach, we headed to El Camino, where the kids behaved themselves and ate their dinner, despite it being close to bed time and despite the fact that they didn't serve grilled cheese. I must have been too tired and hungry to think to bring in my camera (and now that I have a big giant camera, I would feel kind of conspicuous taking pictures in a restaurant). Suffice it to say, the food was amazing and the atmosphere fantastic. Yum.

Photo by Z.

Swimming in the ocean must have pushed me over the edge with the cold I had felt coming on Saturday, because I felt terrible Sunday morning. Here I am making a picnic lunch, wearing the security blanket sweatshirt I bought in New York City when I was eight months pregnant with M and expected the weather to be a lot warmer than it was. I only wear it when I have a dirty job to do (like painting or gardening) or when I feel like I need a wearable hug.

We dropped M off at camp that afternoon. It seemed so, I don't know, monumental. Even though he's been away from home plenty of times to stay with friends and family, this is the first time he's been away for a whole week with total strangers and no way of knowing what he's doing or if he's having fun. I'm guessing he is. I mean, look at all the canoes.

For my birthday, C made me this camp stool. I've been wanting a whole set of these for a long time, and have been looking for vintage ones. This one is a lot bigger and more luxurious than anything I was thinking of. Now we just need four more.

E and Z keep wrapping up random things from around the house and giving them to me as gifts (and sometimes taking them back immediately). E also had us stop at Goodwill on the way back from taking M to camp so he could buy the piece de resistance, a framed picture of ducks flying over a lake, printed on layers of glass so that it looks 3-D. It's somethin' else.

On my actual birthday, I still had a cold and I had a dentist appointment and I had to go to work, so it wasn't nearly as nice as the weekend. But C made me dinner and a blueberry-rhubarb (bluebarb) crisp, so that was nice.