How to Make Homemade Fertilizer for Your Lawn

This wooden bunting can be hung indoors or outdoors.

I hung mine outdoors, where it looks so happy and colorful!

I wanted to make my outdoor space more cheerful, and this wooden bunting, while time-consuming to create, has added a LOT of cheer.

Want a cheerful permanent outdoor decoration of your own? Here’s how to make your own painted wooden bunting!

Materials

There are kind of a lot of supplies at play here, but you can likely scrounge most of them up from your stash.

wood. The amount of wood and the size will depend on the size of your individual bunting pennants. I chose my pennant size mostly because I had plenty of scrap wood that fit those dimensions.

primer. I would have liked a spray paint primer for its ease and efficiency, but I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy new primer when I already own perfectly good brush-on primer. I used Zinsser Bulls Eye, which was overkill here, but totally fine.

paint. Since you’ll be sealing it, almost any type of acrylic paint will work. I used craft acrylics, artist’s acrylics, and indoor house paint, genuinely whatever I had on hand! The sample sizes of indoor housepaint are perfect for this project.

sealant. Again, anything that you’ve got on hand will work, as long as it works with your paint.

cording. You can use a natural material if you’re hanging this bunting indoors, but an outdoor bunting will need something sturdier. I used nylon clothesline.

staples. I knew I’d figure out a reason to buy a staple gun someday, and this was my reason! Excuse me while I wander off to staple EVERYTHING now…

tools. I used pencil, paper, ruler, saw, paintbrushes, and staple gun.

Step 1: Make a template and trace the bunting pennants onto scrap wood.

I made my bunting pennant template an equilateral triangle for simplicity (but I also think that a scalloped bunting would look SO cute!). I calculated an equilateral triangle with a height matching the width of the largest number of scrap wood pieces that I had, and used that as my template. Because board width varies a bit even on boards ostensibly of the same size, I had to fudge the template with some triangles, but it’s not noticeable in the finished project.

Step 2: Cut the wooden bunting pennants.

Pretend my partner is wearing safety glasses and appropriate footwear, sigh. Also, shout out to my seven-year-old picnic table refinish, and this pic of it that has let me know that today is the perfect day to drag out the pressure washer!

You can of course also make these cuts with a handsaw, and put your fingers in slightly less danger by doing so. Regardless of the tool, though, don’t be a Matt, wear your safety glasses!

Step 3: Prime the pennants.

Hand-painting each pennant on all sides, including the edges, was annoyingly time-consuming, but I got the job done without a single trip to Menard’s, so yay!

Step 4: Paint the pennants.

You could paint these pennants however you like, with fantasy scenes or garden scenes or just polka-dots or other embellishments, but my vision was a single color for every pennant, so that’s what I did!

This part of the project is VERY time-consuming, since every pennant will likely need at least a couple of coats of paint, with drying time in between, and rotation so that all sides can get coated equally. I set this up at a table in my family room and strongly insisted to my partner and two adult children home for the summer that this was a Fun Family Project That We Should All Do Together. Nobody was as enthusiastic as I was, ahem, but everybody chipped in at least a little, and other than one small adventure in which one adult kid managed to find a single tube of oil paint of unknown provenance sneaked into the acrylics and therefore paint a pennant that will essentially never dry, all the pennants got perfectly painted!

Step 5: Seal the pennants.

It took almost a week of chipping away at the project before all the pennants were fully painted, but I managed to seal the whole lot with polyurethane sealant in one afternoon. Choose a sealant that’s rated for outdoor use.

Step 6: Staple the pennants to the cording.

Everybody loves tools, so a couple of my helpers popped back up when it was time to start stapling the pennants to cording. I wanted one long single bunting, so I measured out twelve inches of cording on one end, then stapled the pennants to the cording with a couple of inches between each pennant. When we ran out of pennants, I measured another twelve inches at the far end and then cut the cording.

Knot or burn the ends of the nylong cording to keep it from unraveling.

Step 7: Mount the bunting.

Use mounting supplies appropriate to your home’s exterior to mount your bunting. It looks nicest, I think, if a long bunting has several mounting points, so that it’s got lots of lovely looping drapes.

Lol at my partner wearing the exact same paint-splattered basketball shorts and beat-up Crocs on this day. He apparently has a weekend uniform!

Just between us, my brand-new painted wooden bunting is probably just a titch on the gaudy side, but eh, I personally feel like the more colors, the merrier! You could class it up for yourself, though, by limiting the color palette and/or only putting the bunting out seasonally. Which actually gives me the idea of, hear me out… how about a black and orange and purple wooden bunting for Halloween?!? You’d have the most festive front porch in town!