Next week is the kids clothes week challenge! Have you signed up? Do you have a plan? Are you making piles of fabric? My list consists mostly of pants, coats, and some shirts. Not particularly exciting, but it’s what my kids need.

This week I wanted to have a slew of tutorials to get everyone excited to sew next week. There are so many good tutorials out there for simple pants and shirts already. Like these–

1. simple pants pattern
2. basic coat pattern
3. ringer shirt tutorial
4. hoodie to pullover refashion
5. kimono pattern
6. raglan shirt pattern

So instead of patterns and tutorials for pants or tops, I’ve asked some super fantastic children’s clothes makers (and bloggers) to come up with tutorials for details you can add to basic pieces: patches, hoods, pintucks.  Sounds awesome, right? This week will be like the pre-game party for kcwc!

I’m going to kick it off with a little detail tutorial of my own: the bunting tag tutorial. I try to remember to put tags in all the clothes I make, because if I don’t my son will inevitably wear his pants backwards. The elsie marley tag I have is gray–nice and subtle, but not very noticeable to a four year old. So I’ve had to come up with other, more visible tags to use. Bunting, banners, triangles on strings, whatever you call them they are everywhere, so I figured why not put them in your pants?

the bunting tag tutorial

Materials

• bias tape–double fold, single fold, it doesn’t matter just use what you have
• pins
• scissors
• iron
• an article of clothing to put your tags in

Directions

1.  Cut five 2 inch pieces of bias tape. You can use all the same color or different colors, whatever you like. Oh yeah, that is some metallic gold bias tape up there!

2.  Open up one side of the bias tape and iron it flat. Then fold up the folded side to make a triangle–see above photo. 

3.  Turn the triangle over so the fold is in the back. Line them up in the order you like.

4.  Check to see if the triangles are evenly spaced by placing a piece of paper over the raw edges (the bit of cardboard that comes with bias tape works well for this).  This also lets you see what the tag will look like when it’s sewn into your clothes–the triangles overlapping no longer shows and it looks more like a proper bunting.

5.  Pin the triangles and sew or bast them together.  Trim the raw edges to about 1/4 inch.

6. Insert the bunting where you would normally put a tag (the back, duh) and sew that sucker in. Ta Da! A bunting in your pants!  Now your kids won’t put their clothes on backwards and while you are folding the laundry you’ll smile a little when you see these little tags .