December 11 ~ Simple Christmas card banner

Photo by bhg.com

As I mentioned yesterday, my granddaughter and I worked together on banners for our dining room windows.  We made the individual "pennants" together and I sewed them to ribbon a few days later to create the banners.  Here is the link to this project on my Crafting for Christmas Pinterest board: Christmas Card Banner.  If you click the "website" link at the top, you'll be taken to bhg.com, where you can access the specific directions.

I actually found this project in a magazine -- BHG's Holiday Crafts for 2011, a magazine worth owning  if you see a copy somewhere.  Don't be put off by all of the Halloween stuff; there are far more Christmas projects and I can see easily a dozen or more that I want to try.  This is a magazine that my sweet daughter had placed on my pillow when we arrived for our last fall visit with them.

As I mentioned, we adapted the pattern quite freely.  It called for the cards to be attached to fabric pennants.  I priced the fabric at Jo-Ann's out there and even bought a small piece of it, but it was pricey so I only got enough for one banner.  So, for our project, we used red card stock rather than red fabric.  It's neat because you don't use just fronts of cards, but the messages from inside as well, which can be fun because some of the messages are really neat and some of the handwriting of friends and loved ones can be preserved as well.

One thing we did find to be a bit of a problem was finding cards with the right format to fit the pennant templates (triangles) we had made.  If I had it to do again, I would use a sort of reverse template, kind of like a stencil, whereby I would cut the triangle out of a larger piece of cardboard and use the empty triangle space to place over the Christmas card so I could position it better and make sure it would look good and fit the design well. 

Banner 1

Banner 2

Banner 3

The ribbon I used was some I had purchased from Home-Sew back in the 1970s or early 1980s.   It is red and velvety on one side and red & white checked on the other side.  I thought that since there were so many varying shades of red in the project, that the checked side would look nicer.

So that is our card project.  As I mentioned, I adapted it pretty freely from the pattern, so if you have questions about what we did, just ask them in the comments and I will answer as soon as I can.