... birthday banner

I'm working on a sewing project for a friend at the mo that's taking a bit of time, so I don't have a lot to post. But today I realized it was about time to take down my birthday banner (more than a month after my birthday), and I thought, gosh-darn it, it was cute. So I thought I'd throw up a quick post about making it.

Flag banners - so hot right now.

Is it lame to make your own birthday banner? It might be. It's at least lame-adjacent. But it was a big birthday for me ("venerable, but not at all matronly" is how George described it on the party invite. You can guess the number). I wanted an excuse to make a cute flag banner anyway! And here's how I did it:

I started with a pretty patterned paper in dark pinks and reds and some cover-weight paper in a coordinating light blue from Paper Source.

Purty.

I basically found a font I liked in MS Word, blew it up to like 260 pt and printed out the letters for Happy Birthday. Then, because I forgot to also buy an Exacto Knife, I cut the letters out with scissors. Very carefully.

My right hand was a claw.

Then I traced the letters onto the back of the patterned paper with a pencil and (again) carefully cut them out.

If you have a better sense of spatial awareness than I, you have probably already spotted the problem here.

Doh!!

Luckily I could salvage the symmetrical letters like the H and the T. The others I re-traced the right way (or the wrong way, as the case happened to be). Then I drew triangles on the blue paper with a straight edge, cut them out (I needed to take scissor breaks with all the cutting), leaving an extra inch at the top to fold over. I used a glue stick to glue the letters on the triangles. I laid the triangles out on the floor face down, in order (this was almost another disaster - I nearly spelled out YADHTRIB YPPAH but saw the problem at the last second), and folded the top of each one over a length of yarn, using a glue stick on the edges.

Thankfully not backwards.

That's it! I hung it up with that blue putty stuff and it's been up there every since. And since I tactfully omitted the birthday year, I can use it again next year. Score.