When I found out that Katarina Roccella, who is a designer for Art Gallery Fabric, was coming out with a new fabric line called Pandalicious, I knew I wanted to make something really special with it. I have been living in Asia for the last 10 years, so I was buzzing with ideas on how to combine Modern and Traditional, Eastern and Western ideas. This project came out of the conversation with my husband, who suggested making something with lanterns, a decoration that I see every day around Taipei that never fails to cheer me up.

I searched for ideas of different lanterns and drew some shapes out with the help of clip art. I will be making a tutorial with three different types of lanterns soon. There is 12 total, each representing specific fabric from Pandalicious line. Each lantern is double sides, is quilted to give it a three dimensional feel, bound and embellished with a tassel that I made from coordinating embroidery floss.

I hung the lanterns from a pom pom string and tried different sizes for different looks. The big pom pom look was my favorite, it gave the bunting a really whimsical feel. I also added light weight wire to the rectangle lantern to give it some “accordion like” dimension (the picture below is before I added the wire, you can see the difference in the lantern from the pictures above.)

My wonderful sister in law, who helps me with photography, traveled with me around Taipei looking for perfect spots for our photoshoot. I am so happy with how everything turns out, and so happy to have worked with Katarina Roccella (whose fan I have been for quite some time). You can check this project and couple others of mine in Art Gallery Fabric’s new lookbook for Pandalicious. Stay tuned for the lantern bunting tutorial that should be up around August. Check out my second project for the lookbook, the paper umbrellas runner here.