Make your own heraldic bunting for #Buntingmas

You don't need a printer for any of this :)

If you don't have any paper but do have a laptop / phone / pad you can create your own online heraldic flags here, with some suggested 'code' to type in at the end (see DrawShield below)

#Buntingmas starts tomorrow (11th April) and is a made-up (by me) festival to bring more bunting into our lives and homes. Take a photo of your bunting and tag it with #Buntingmas (Twitter / Instagram).

If you hate bunting this is possibly not the festival for you but to be fair it's probably quite easy to ignore - it's not like the Royal Wedding or the Olympics where bunting was unavoidably ubiquitous. This bunting will mostly be in people's houses, though I'm looking forward to photos of socks on washing lines - pretty much anything you can think of counts as bunting during #Buntingmas.

Unless you already have ready-made bunting to hand (yes that counts) the quickest and simplest bunting involves folding a bit of paper into a concertina and cutting out a half-V shaped notch that produces lots of bunting when unfolded, the second simplest involves folding a sheet of paper in a slightly different way then cutting out the resulting triangle shapes and decorating / hanging them.

The first one needs scissors (harder without but probably not impossible!), the second one doesn't though it's neater if you have them to hand.

Heraldic bunting ideas
The bunting below will definitely be easier with scissors. If you don't have coloured pens or pencils you could just use black and white patterns, or even use cross-hatching to represent colours. Make up your own colour scheme.

The image above shows cross-hatching to represent colours used in heraldry - white for Argent (silver or white), black dots on a white background for Or (gold or yellow), horizontal lines for Azure (blue), vertical lines for Gules (red), horizontal & vertical cross-hatching for Sable (black), diagonal lines running down from top left to bottom right for Vert (green) and diagonal lines running up from bottom left to top right for Purpure (purple). Source: Boutell's Heraldry (1963)

1. Draw a series of blank shield shapes (inspiration) onto pieces of paper 
If you don't have scissors then you could draw the shields next to each other with a small distance between, in a sort of bunting pattern! If your paper is thin enough you could lay it on your device screen and very carefully draw round an on-screen shield shape.

If you have a ruler available choose a width that can easily be divided into six for the checky pattern (see 48 in the top panel on the right below).

2. Decorate them
3. Photograph and share on social media, tagged #Buntingmas
4. (Optional) Cut them out, stick or hang them up in some way then photograph and share.

Images above are simple designs used to illustrate the naming conventions in heraldry - click to enlarge. Source: Boutell's Heraldry (1963)


I rather like 'lozengy' and 'gyronny' and used them in my own heraldic bunting shields, most of which were taken from the book about heraldry I have and some were made up. I used tracing paper to copy a general shield design from the book and used that to create a bunch of blank shields, then I used either ruler and pencil to mark out shapes or traced them. The riverbus logo (looks a bit like a boat, though not much like a galleon) I traced off my iPhone screen which was quite fiddly.

Then I coloured them in, cut them out and taped them to a bit of string before hanging on my living room door.

If you do have a printer and want to use my design help yourself (there's a gap where I made a mistake!).

  

The pic above on the left is the one I drew and scanned in (photographed with phone), the one on the right is the resulting line drawing produced after running it through (free) Inkscape.

The coloured-in heraldic shields

     

I used a bit of string to hang up my bunting but you could just arrange it on a table or the floor to take a photograph.


Book of Traceable Heraldic Art
http://heraldicart.org/



Using DrawShield (no printer / no paper needed)
The DrawShield website will let you create shields using a 'blazon' (the language used to describe a shield). You can learn more about blazons and blazonry here.

One of two of my shields are not exactly valid, heraldically-speaking, but try inputting the following blazons to create some shields (then try reversing the order of colours or changing them completely).

• Or a chevron tenné = gold / yellow with an orange chevron
• Purpure a bar tenné = purple with a horizontal orange bar 
• Quarterly, per fess wavy, tenné and azure = split in four, wiggly horizontal line, orange & blue 
• Argent a gurges purpure = White / silver shield with a variant 'gurges' (whirlpool) of purple. The concentric circles shown here is less common, pinched from the family De Gorges' shield, the more common variant (same blazon) results in a spiral pattern.
• Checky gules and argent = checkerboard pattern, red and white / silver
• Barry dancetty vert and gules = Wiggly horizontal lines, shield is green, wiggly lines are red
• Or, three fleurs de lis vert = gold / yellow shield with 3 fleur de lis flowers on it 
• Gules a sun or = red shield, gold sun
• Azure a ship argent = blue shield, white ship (in my own case it's the logo for the River Bus)
• Gyronny of vert and azure = repeating panels of green and yellow (try 'gyronny of six vert and azure' for a variant)
• Tenné a fleam or = Orange / brown (I think modern heraldry distinguishes these colours but Ye Olde version just treated it as one) shield with a gold / yellow fleam.
• Lozengy sable and argent = lozenge pattern in black and silver / white
• Argent a hound tenné passant = White / silver shield, brown dog 'striding' (facing left with right forepaw raised)
• I did a cat (argent) one too on a green (vert) shield
• And a non-heraldic bunting upon bunting one. The thing that looks like a pair of yellow and red pants is actually Or, two flaunches gules (Gold/yellow with red flanches / flaunches)

Previous adventures in Buntingmas
An even easier way to make bunting from folded paper - no printer needed #Buntingmas (9 April 2020)
Remember the chain of paper dolls you made as a child, cutting out a half person shape on folded paper then unfolding and producing a chain of people holding hands? Same, but with bunting.

#Buntingmas (it's 11 Apr): How to make low-tech bunting from paper (Wed 1 April 2020)
Folding paper and producing the flags which can then be taped to string, hole punched, glued, blue tacked to the wall or damped and stuck to the window (or just arranged artfully on a table). If you've use water-solube pens etc to decorate them you might want to give the 'damp and stick to window' a swerve, but I stuck a blank bunting to my window on 1 April and it's still there.

How will you celebrate Buntingmas? Craft ideas and classroom activities (Sat 28 Dec 2019)
This post lists some craft options including cake decorations (roll out some icing, cut vaguely triangular shapes, stick on a cake), bunting can be knitted or crocheted, made from modelling clay, actual fabric, paper or you might prefer to draw some online bunting.

The post also has some suggestions about using patterns on flags in communication - eg maritime signal flags, or using the position of flags as the communication (eg semaphore).  Not mentioned in the post is heraldry (another post is coming on that topic) but there's a link to an article about kids making their own coat of arms or personal flag by dividing a shield or flag shape into four and then drawing some favourite things in each segment.