This project would be great for the Fourth, but with the neutral colors, you could really hang it year-round. Can you guess what it’s made from? It’s a flag made from window blind slats! Remember Tipsy Tuesday a few weeks ago when I showed you how to shorten your blinds? I used those extra slats for this project.

Supplies Needed for Flag Made from Window Blind Slats:

• Window blind slats
• 2 colors of fabric, one light, and one dark- use heavy-weight fabric to help hide the holes in the slats
• Hot glue & glue gun
• Upholstery webbing
• Paint
• Spray glue (optional)

First, gather an odd number of slats- this number may differ depending on how long your slats are. Just use whatever number gives you a pleasing flag-like rectangle. My slats were 22 1/2 inches long. I used seven slats.

Cut 4 strips of your darker fabric about 1 inch taller than the height of each slat. Cut the width slightly longer than the length of the slats. I used drop cloth fabric.

Cut 3 strips from your light-colored fabric. I cut mine from a white canvas shower curtain I had on hand.

Wrap a strip around each slat and hot glue to the backside. Make sure there is a bit of the slat showing between where the two edges are glued.

Trim the excess from each end.

Alternate your slats with the dark color at the top and bottom. Leave a slight gap between each slat.

Flip them over, maintaining the gaps and lining up the ends. Hot glue strips of webbing about 3 inches in from each side. Make sure you hot glue to the bare sections of the slat, not just to the fabric.

Once the glue is dry, flip back to the front and figure out how big you want the square in the upper left corner. I just eyeballed it and ended up with a square measuring about 6 1/2 inches.  (That dark splotch on the square is just water from ironing the fabric.)

I used the same drop cloth fabric for the square and frayed the edges so that it wouldn’t blend in too much with the stripes. Don’t attach it to the flag yet.

Now you need to draw (or print out) a star and cut it out.  Keep the surrounding paper that you cut the star from.

Place the star in whatever position you want. I wanted mine off-center and off the edge a bit.

Once you’ve figured out where you want the star, place the paper you saved back around the star and tape it into place. Remove the star shape. Now you have a stencil in the correct position.

To paint, carefully move the fabric square and stencil to another area. Tape off surrounding areas and paint inside the stencil. I painted with white spray paint, but it didn’t show up very well, so I went back over it with white milk paint. Craft paint would have worked fine- I just used what I had. I didn’t wait for the spray paint to dry, just brushed right over the sticky paint.

For once, my impatience worked in my favor. This created a textural, uneven look which I love.

Once the paint is dry (I used a hair dryer to hurry it along), glue the square into place. You can use hot glue, but I used spray glue so that it wouldn’t have the lumps that you get from hot glue.

Now just hot glue or tack a ribbon to the back and hang. I trimmed the seam from my drop cloth and used it as a hanger.

You could also use paper to craft a flag made from window blind slats. What unusual materials have you used to make a flag?