D.I.Y. Birthday Banner

Hello again! To continue our D.I.Y. projects, today we will show you how to make your own Birthday banner. As we wrote in our last post our niece is turning 1 this weekend and we are very excited and happy for this special occasion that we decided to help out my brother and make a couple of the decorations. We already showed you how to make Birthday crowns since our niece is having a princess pink theme. It's Banner Time!!!So for this project you will need the following:

1. Cardstock paper (in 2 colors)          5.Rubber cement glue
2.1 sheet of white poster board           6.Glue gun & glue
3. Ribbon (in desired color)                 7.Scissors
4. Glitter                                               8.Tweezers

So in order to begin this project start with the color scheme that your going for. Ours was centered around the color pink. The second thing is decide how big you want your letters to appear on the banner. Our letters were 3 1/2 inches. Now if you don't have the money to buy letter stencils you can do what we did which was make our own. First we went to our handy dandy computer and used the PowerPoint program to make letters to the desired size we wanted. It'll take you a couple of letters at a time to print based on how big you decide to make your letters and we used a light shade so we didn't end up using a lot of ink to print our letters.

 

 

The next step we did before putting glitter on the letters was to first cut them out after printing them. Then pasted them on the white poster board to make the letters more sturdy since regular paper is lightweight.

 

 

 After we let the letters dry for a bit (about 20min.) we cut out the letters once more. Once you have all the letters cut out the fun and messy part begins. The Glitter!($2.99 @Michaels) We once again used the rubber cement on the letters and covered each letter completely in glitter. We grabbed our tweezers and shook out the access glitter then put the letters on a sheet of paper.(*The tweezers are easier to move the letters since you might have glue on your hands!)  Do all the letters and leave them on the sheet of paper overnight, just to make sure the rubber cement sticks with the glitter on the letter.

 

 



 

Now to make the background for your letter. We decided to make a simple flower. We used to different shades of pink of cardstock paper (8for $1 @Michaels) to go with our nieces pink theme. Make sure you count exactly how many you will need or use before you begin. Also its always a good idea to make an extra 2 of each. Just in case you make a mistake you have a back-up. Remember we are new to this too! So it's okay if you make a mistake. For the bud of the flower we used the lid of a condiment from our house which was a 1/2 an inch larger then our letters. We outlined on the opposite side of the paper since no one person can cut a traced line perfectly. You won't be able to see the traced line in the front. I found a pretty simply design of a flower which was about an inch larger than our bud. Trace the same way on the opposite side of the paper, and we were lucky to get 2 flowers from 1 sheet of cardstock paper. So in the end you will have three parts of your banner before you put the flower together. 1.the letter, 2.the bud, and 3.the flower.

 

 

So now comes more FUN! Putting it together!

 

Think of it as a puzzle. First using your rubber cement glue the bud to each of the flowers. Let them dry for at least 20 mins. Yes that long just to make sure it does fall off when you add the letters. Remember the glitter adds weight to the letters. Then using your handy dandy tweezers grab a letter and this time using your glue gun (Cause you really want these suckers to stick!) put some glue to the back and quickly place the letter on your flower. Carefully with the tweezers put some pressure to the letter onto the flower to make sure they stick. Then leave the flowers on a clean surface. We put ours on the floor and left them overnight. I say wait about an hour before you hang them. You don't have to leave them overnight as we did. It's just we did ours in the evening and honestly, we were tired.

 







 
So next we used regular wrapping ribbon I had in my collection of ribbons. (f.y.i. I like wrapping gifts in ribbon instead of putting an already made bow. I have a lot of ribbon!) First decide how you want each letter position before gluing each one on your ribbon. Use your hot glue gun and add dots to the back of each flower then quickly add to the ribbon. (Sorry this part might hurt!) Using your fingers press the flower with the ribbon so the glue spreads a bit and sticks. This might burn a little so sorry. I have burnt tips if that makes y'all feel a littler better. Have fun with this though and let your imagination run wild on how you want your banner to look like. And this is a preview on how it looks.

 

Remember, make sure you give yourself time to do these projects. They are suppose to be fun and bring out the creativity in you. If it becomes stressful or feels like a job or chore, Mmmm.... Maybe this is not for you. Good look and we always love hearing from you. Until next time.