Cloth flags

So I was in the "pound shop" killing some time and waiting for a bus. I often go in there as its great for buying bits and pieces for use in wargaming. I had been thinking about cloth flags for my new muslim crusades project and was keeping my eye out for the right cloth... A pack of three dish cloths caught my eye. I liked the criss cross patters of the fabric so bought them and hoped to myself that they wouldnt jam my printer.

Predictably it did and I spent some time fixing the jam. When I finally got it out (I had been quite rough) the thing made a dreadful screeching noise. I had broken it... Luckily my flat m8 has a printer I could have a go at breaking so I borrowed his. This time I put a few dabs of glue on a piece of A4 paper and placed some cloth of equal size on it. I fed it through and the print came out surprisingly well. I then soaked it in some very diluted brown ink. This made the cloth look much more rugged but smudged the print argh!!!

Attempt no 3. (successful)

1 I applied the brown wash to the cloth and cut to A4 size
2 dabbed a few patches of white glue to A4 paper and joined
3 Got a bunch of images from google
4 fed through the printer using basic "windows photo gallery" print function with the "contact sheet" setting. This made a perfect size for 28mm flags. VERY little messing about.
5 cut the flags to size and tore a few fibres off here and there to fray the edges.
6 Glued to flag pole, rolling it up with normal white glue.
7 folded and applied lots of Matt varnish to stiffen.

And that was it. Easy and I think they look quite good. They arnt that rigid though Im not too bothered, They hold their shape well enough but ill keep my eye out for a way to make them more so..

PS 1 of the flags here (the purple on) was made from an actualy war flag image. This meant that it has two hlafs you fold together. I thought this would make it too thick but It was ok. In fact it was perhaps better becuase the glue I used made it more stiff and it is of course, double sided...