The bunt (bunting) weave came about in the mid sixteen hundreds in England, north of London. It was first use to strain beer in the local pubs. I’ll have to look back on my notes from the Baltimore symposium at the Star Spangled Banner House for names & dates, if I recall correctly a merchant from one of the villages approached one of the ships Captain of the Royal Navy on the use of the bunting to replace the silk sails, bedding, etc. on the ships. To make a long story short, the merchant ended up with a contract to supply the Royal Fleet with the bunting, he employed three or four villages in the making of the bunting, the first textile mill you could say in England.

Up to early eighteen hundred wool was the only raw material used to make bunting, cotton was used first as a blind with wool to make it stronger but after 1844 a finishing process ,mercerizing, was invented, which made cotton bunting stronger and last longer then wool bunting. Cotton bunting started to replace wool for sails, bedding and other cloth used to outfit a ship, sometime mistakenly call yacht cloth. Cotton bunting with slightly tighter weave is canvas, awning strip canvas, cotton duck, elope canvas has stiff open mesh and is used for fine cross stitched work, unbleached cotton linen canvas is used for interlinings.

There are five classes of wool, merino is number one, from the merino breed, it held on as the main flag bunting until about WWII but cotton bunting was used in flag making as early as 1850. A finer weave of merino wool was used for flag making and to make undergarments, what grandma use to call step-ins, until they were replaced with a softer cotton linen.

If I have confused you Sorry, but the history of bunting and its use is a long one, I'm simplifying it all here.

Happy Trails!
Tom Martin