Dollhouse Miniature Saint Patrick's Day Garden Flag

 

Watch the video here.

This week I wanted to make a garden flag to go on the holder we made a few weeks ago, (video here) Since we have been working on getting the dollhouse porch ready for Saint Patrick's Day that was the theme I decided to go with.

I looked online and found a lot of inspiration in flags that are for sale for our real homes. In the end I decided to combine ideas from a couple that I really liked and I do love how it turned out.

One of the things I love about making the garden flags is that I get to play with fabric. You see sewing and fabric have been a part of my life and crafting for my entire life and I am always excited when I can merge any kind of fabric craft into the dollhouse.

For the flag itself I am using some bleached muslin fabric. This is a less expensive 100% cotton fabric that is pretty easy to find anywhere that sells fabric. It comes in a lot of different widths and prices many times start at just a few dollars per yard. I use it for so many things around the house that when I find a sale I purchase several yards at a time so I always have some on hand.

For our flag we need a piece that is 1” by 3”.

To begin our flag we are going to paint a background.

I decided to use fabric paints although if you don't have any plain craft paint could be used. I just prefer to use fabric paint on fabric since it is formulated to work better. In this case it is totally optional though.

I wanted my pot of gold to be set against a blue sky so I wanted a light blue color that was slightly mottled with white. To achieve this since I have a limited range of colors in my fabric paint collection I mixed some white (about 2 drops) with the blue I have (about 1 drop) I used a toothpick to mix these but left some color streaking. I then used a plain cotton ball to apply the paint. Don't go too heavy you want a sky with some clouds look.

This then needs to dry completely before we can move onto the next step.

Once the paint was completely dry I added my rainbow. I wanted to have the colors of rainbow be really vibrant against the sky and I wanted to have the control to place the colors exactly where I wanted them. To do this I chose to use alcohol markers, mine are made by Bic but any brand will work, you could use anything from Sharpies to Copic markers or a mix of different brands. I recommend working on a piece of plain white paper (I use a folded piece of printer paper) this will help to soak up some of the excess ink and keep bleeding to a minimum. I did finger press the crease at the top of flag to aid in placement of my rainbow and don't forget you need to do one on each end so that your flag will be two sided.

Now the ink needs a couple of hours to dry and cure, I found in playing around with this project that if I tried to move to the next step too quickly it just didn't work, the glue on the paper backed fusible wouldn't stick. After a few hours however it worked just fine.

So now we are going to make a flag out of our strip of fabric. To do this we need to adhere the loose ends of the strip to form a flag. I am using a paper backed fusible web for this. I feel it is far superior to glue for this project and is very easy to use.

If you are not familiar with this product let me do a short explanation here for you.

Basically what this is is a piece of paper with a heat activated glue on it. You use the heat of an iron to apply it to the back of the first piece of fabric, remove the paper backing and then use the iron to add the second fabric.

The brand of the product I am using is Heat 'n Bond, and I am using the ultra hold variety. I do recommend this for this project. It is easy to find prepackaged in pretty much any store that sells fabric.

The iron I am using is from the Tulip company (same as the fabric paint) and is sold in craft stores near the other fabric embellishment stuff. It is fairly inexpensive (around $15) and great to have on hand for craft project where you don't want to haul out the big iron and ironing board. I used a wooden cutting board covered with a piece of printer paper as my ironing surface.

Once you have your flag fused together we can paint on the pot of gold. This is going to be done in a couple of easy steps.

First the pot of gold is a simple shape at the bottom of the flag. Once again I used some of my fabric paint for this. I do recommend a small stiff, flat brush like I used in the video. For the second side I grabbed a different shape brush and it was a bit harder to get the right shape. 

 

Once the black paint is dry you can add the gold coins to the pot. Since I don't have any gold paint in my collection of fabric paint I used my gold Brushed Metal paint that Plaid sent to me. It is fine for this since the flag is for decoration only. To apply the paint I used the flat end of a wooden skewer from the kitchen, it worked great to make coin shapes.

Once the gold was dry I did the extra step of adding some gold glitter 3-D paint using the same skewer.

Once the gold glitter was dry I trimmed any loose threads and the flag was ready to hang on the dollhouse. I love this flag and can't wait to come up with more seasonal designs in the coming months.

As always I do want to sincerely thank all of you for watching my videos and reading my blog posts. It means so much to me that you are supporting me in this way. If I could ask you all to do just a bit more by subscribing to the channel and liking the videos and leaving comments. Those help more than you can imagine. Also if you could pass the links on to your friends I would appreciate it so much.