Wow, December flew by! Busy month at work and of course, with the holiday season. The raccoon flag  went up as scheduled on the 4th of December. Here it is, flying high in support of “DailyFlag for Daily Bread” fundraiser.  In this blog, I talk about the final touches that went into the flag.

At the time of this writing, all 25 flags are up and are contain a mix of different crafting styles and themes. The technical skills include acrylic on canvas, stained glass, origami mobiles on boughs, photos printed on canvas,  appliqués like this one and even laser-cut stainless steel! It’s very cool to see such density of crafting talent in the neighbourhood.

So what was left to do on the racooon flag? The moon and clouds were a later addition, to give it some oomph but we saw that. Two major changes here are that: 1) the racoon tails now have stripes and 2) there are yellow shapes to indicate the lighting of the lifeguard house at night.

The racoon stripes were simple but very tedious. Lots of small rectangles, lots of ends to pull through the back and tie up. But totally worth it. A friend looked at the flag and said, “Oh, they’re *raccoons*! I thought they were cats!”. Like I said, worth it.

Here I am, hard at work:

For the light, we briefly considered sewing in an LED into the flag. Looked more kitschy when we gave it a shot by stealing one from a kids’ toy:

The yellow shapes look much better (see picture at top). I managed to finish it the afternoon of the 3rd, just before the photo was taken for the DailyFlag website.  Since then a lot of Beachers have had nice things to say about the flag, which is most encouraging. The bids are really picking up on the DailyFlag website too, which is even more encouraging.

I’m looking forward to other appliqué projects in the future, maybe something combined with block prints.  Let’s end with my piece of scrap fabric, on which all stitches were first tested.