I made a feather flag for tour night!
And it only took about four months to happen… the concept germinated after many Thursday tour nights prior to the official relocation of the lobby, finding bewildered visitors clustered at the “new” lobby door, unable to get in.
One day, perusing the weekly selection of cast-offs at the UNT Salvage Sale, I discovered a cache of feather flag hardware being sold for a decent (cheap) price. I went online and found a downloadable artwork diagram that I figured I could use as a pattern and bought some parachute-type nylon at Joann’s. Then, progress slowed down, as I weighed the options for getting the text onto the fabric. Applique? Printing? Vinyl? I went to visit my peeps at the Garland ISD Printing Services Dept. We decided to see what would happen using their big flatbed inkjet printer. I cut off a sample of the fabric, and we let ‘er rip. It worked well enough, but we agreed that a better vacuum seal would be better. Then, I got sucked into the vortex of getting the sewing room set up and other CA honey-do’s, and the flag moved to a back burner.
In early September, I got back to the project at hand. We used double-stick tape to attach the fabric to foam core, and did the printing. Then, they printed out the pattern for me. I unfurled the whole ping pong cutting table, and set to work. The red stripe at the bottom was incorporated to makeup for the printed portion being too short. (Flatbed printer had limits). I ironed some fusible interfacing to the back of panels to try to make them a bit more opaque. Iron was a bit too hot, so the fabric melted/shrunk a bit. But I forged ahead. I did the first part of sewing on one of the DMS Babylock Zest sewing machines (stitched like a champ!) the black tube for the vertical rod was made at a sewing retreat I went on later that week. That was actually done TWICE, as I under-estimated the width needed to accommodate the pole. But persevered.
Then, I discovered that there needed to be some sort of tension added to keep the flag flexed properly. I’d pass feather flags on the street and slow down to glimpse the setup.
Last night, @MizGeek and @talkers helped me put a grommet at the bottom, and @apparently_weird and @CaryF300 helped me install it for its maiden “tour night” voyage.