All Good flag

One of the problems with music festivals is finding one's campsite among the sea of tents. Daniel and I always tend to use other people's stuff as markers - last year someone brought in a giant weather balloon that was great as a point of reference. At least it *was* great until the night it poured and the balloon's line became twisted on something at ground level. We got soaked as we wandered around trying to find the balloon and our site, and we heard many other festival-goers complaining about the same thing.

This year Daniel decided to make our own flag for our campsite. The design of this was entirely his - he modeled it after 1960s concert posters, and used my profile from one of our wedding photos for the face. He wanted the flag to be viewable from two sides but face towards the pole on each side, so he reversed the design for the back and adjusted the shape of the lettering so that it would appear correctly against the hair.




After creating the design on his computer he handpainted the lettering and the face, and traced in pencil the hair's shape on some really cool cotton fabric that we found at Joann's. I outlined the hair on my sewing machine with black thread in a short zigzag stitch. Given the flag's 18"x24" size and its height at the campsite, we decided that a satin stitch wasn't necessary - it would have eaten thread and taken forever. There was no interfacing or stabilizer between the flag and hair layers as I sewed and it didn't pucker very much. I pinned well around the outside and used a few pieces of Stitch Witchery within the shape to hold everything together. Once the hair was completely stitched I trimmed all the excess fabric from around the stitching.

After both flag sides were sewn and ironed I added a piece of medium weight sew-in interfacing to the flag and finished by sewing and edgestitching all four edges. The flag will be attached to a 10' pole through the 6 metal eyelets on the top and side edge of the flag. Daniel's constructing the pole right now - it is of PVC pipe and is in four sections so that we can stow it in the car and assemble it at the campsite.

This is officially the last project for the festival. Now all we have to do is pack.