Decorate your garden, house or fete with personalized bunting made from recycled paper.

Step 1: Materials Needed

To make your bunting you will need suitable pieces of paper (the paper shown in the photo is recycled packing paper; old large envelopes also have nice strong paper), a straight edge and a pair of scissors.

You also need materials to decorate the bunting - pens and pencils if you want to draw your own design, or letters and pictures to stick on and glue.

You'll need garden twine, string or ribbon to string the letters up and tape is helpful to hold them on (but you could also use more glue or staples).

Step 2: Pennants

For each pennant you need a to draw a triangle with a flap at the top. The size of the triangle depends on how many pennants you want (or how many letters you have if you're spelling out a message) and the length you want the bunting to be. My pieces of paper were roughly A4/ Letter paper size, and the flap at the top was the width of my ruler. Drawing a dot in the centre of the paper at the bottom gave me the two long sides of the triangle.

Step 3: Decorating the Pennants

Once you have cut out your pennant, fold the flaps over to the back and cut the corners off the flaps so that they're not visible when they're folded over.

Add your decoration to the front of the pennant. I printed out clip art letters, because I'm not very artistic, but you can really go all out to personalize your bunting.

Step 4: Hanging the Bunting

Cut a length of garden twine that is slightly longer than your hanging space, and tie it up at both ends. If your message has more than one word, or is very long, you can tie the string up in the middle as well to make several loops.

Attach each letter in turn by hanging it from the string by its flap. Secure the flap down with tape, glue or a staple. The letters will still move around, so when they're all up you can position them as you like.

Step 5: Recycle Your Bunting

When you've finished using your bunting, you can pack it away for next time - it doesn't take up much space and the pennants can be taken off the string and rearranged, so it's possible to make a new message for the next special occasion.

If you don't want to use your bunting again then (provided you've used biodegradable materials) it can be added to the compost heap and become part of your garden :)