Fiddlers Green

Sometimes I have occasion to make a tiny flag for a building, and they're pretty tough to get right. Either you try to print on both sides of thin paper or you fold something over, and you always end up with something that looks nothing like a flag. I recently figured out how to do it.

1. With your inkjet printer, print your flags on a piece of cardstock. You're going to use this as a carrier sheet, so if you want to print at draft quality to save ink, that's fine.

2. Lick and stick a gummed cigarette paper over the image of the flag. The cigarette paper should completely cover the flag, and the gummed edge needs to be toward the top of your carrier sheet in relation to how your printer pulls paper through.

3. Reload the carrier sheet and print again, this time at full resolution. The ink should soak through the cigarette paper just enough to give you a reversed image on the underside, but not so much that it makes the image blurry -- at least it does with my printer. Carefully tear the cigarette paper off and trim the flag with scissors.

4. Crumple it a bit to simulate the effect of flapping in the wind. Glue it to your flag pole -- I usually use a sewing pin for flags that go on top of a building. It will look more realistic if the trailing edge of your flag is lower than the edge where it fastens to the pole.