A couple of years ago my family had an amazing opportunity to spend a month in Japan. It was the trip of a lifetime and I'm still inspired by so much of what we saw. We arrived in April when there are carp flags flying everywhere to celebrate Children's Day. You can see a photo of a typical shopping center in Kyoto. They fly in front of every home and business and the effect is beautiful.

Traditionally they fly from a pole. The top fish is the biggest and represents the father. It's usually black. The next one down is red and represents the mother. After that are smaller fish for each of the children (sometimes just the sons). Those usually start with blue and then move into other colors depending on the region. I love this idea and wanted to create a version that was a smaller indoor banner, with one fish representing each member of the family.

You get. . .

• A digital pattern delivered by email. (If you're not sure what a PDF pattern is, you'll find more info here.)
• full-sized embroidery patterns for three fish
• complete stitching instructions to embroider the fish and sew up the banner
• loads of step by step photos - you'll never feel lost of wonder if you're doing things right

Size

The embroidery pattern includes fish in three sizes (10, 9 and 8 inches long). You could easily reduce them down even smaller to add more children, or you can make all the children the same size.

Difficulty

Easy! It looks very detailed, but this is a very simple sewing pattern and only uses the most basic embroidery stitches. You can make it!