Lawn Striping American Flag

This Instructable describes my process of cutting an American flag in my lawn. The process is a combination of using a lawn mower and string trimmer. The flag's alternating stripes is created by changing the lawn mower's blade height, rather than the normal method of lawn striping by alternating the mow direction to create a nap (changing the grass bend direction to reflect the light differently in each direction). The flag's canton (rectangular emblem at the upper left of flag) is created by outlining a rectangle with a string trimmer, and using the string trimmer to cut the grass low. Alternatively, the canton could have been created by long grass, with stars cut into the grass.

• Lawn Mower
• (Optional) String Trimmer
• (Optional) Stakes
• (Optional) Tape Measure

The following is a summary of the flag's design specification. Its proportion is 10:19. The canton is the height of 7 stripes. The canton width is two-fifths of the flag width. My lawn's size and the constraint of my lawn mower's width prevented getting these exact proportions, so I used artistic license and made the canton square, 5 strips high, and width of the flag the size that filled the area of my front lawn that I wanted to cover.

The layout was iterative. I got a rough estimate of the canton size based on my lawn mower's wheel base. I used my lawn mower to draw guide lines into the grass, without the blade running, to get the height of the canton. I put stakes at the upper right and bottom right of the rectangle. I then found the upper left and lower left corners by matching the size of the right side of the rectangle, then measuring the diagonals and moving the left stakes until the diagonals were equal.

The height of the grass alternates with each stripe. My mower was set to 6 for the high grass (red stripes), and 3 for the low grass (white stripes). The stripes at the top and bottom of the flag are red, and hence high mower setting.

Using the mower's wheel lines as a guide, from the previous step, I started mowing the "white" low stripes. I did not use self propel because that gave me more control to go exactly on the guide line. I turned off the mower at the end of each stripe and then pushed it back over the lawn to create the lines for the next set of stripes. After I finished the low stripes, I readjusted the mower setting to the high setting for the "red" stripes, and repeated the process.

I used a string trimmer to sharply define the canton rectangle, and a string trimmer to cut the grass in the rectangle.

I created a lawn striping design once before, in the shape of my daughter's high school letter, N, for her graduation party. The shading was created by the direction of the mowing, producing a nap by bending the grass blades over to reflect the light differently. In this Instructable's design, I wanted to create a more pronounced shading by mowing at different depths.

It takes some planning and extra time, but it was a fun and creative project. The American flag design is a good starter project due to its straight lines. I can imagine other designs with curves, with different height lines.

If this Instructable inspired you to make your lawn into a canvas, please write about it in the comments. I'd love to hear about it.

Have fun,

Barry