About every three months, I like to change the looks of the Juniors' Sabbath School room at church.
I had moved two pillars to the front and hung a large piece of felt to make a storage place behind it.
The blank spot above the felt was really in need of something. So the idea of a banner was born!
I asked the Juniors to submit ideas as to what the banner should say. I received a few ideas, and the one that was picked was "God is Love. 1 John 4:8"
I purchased 1 yard of 90" wide white muslin at JoAnn's Fabrics. I was pretty happy to find it 40% off too!
Since we were going to be coloring these, I chose to go with a block style font.
Placing the printed off words under the muslin, I traced the words onto the muslin.
(Hint: You will want to do this on a hard surface or place a cutting mat underneath as I did.)
The letters were a little more work, but not much. I used Picmonkey.com since they have so many more neat fonts to choose from than my wordprocessor. Since the size of each letter was so large, I didn't have to stick with a block style font.
The "is" was printed on one sheet of paper.
For "God" and "Love" I needed the words to be larger than I could print on one sheet of paper. Even printing one letter per page was not large enough, so blockposters.com to the rescue! I uploaded my files and created a 4 page wide by 2 page high poster for each word to print out. Piecing all the pages together gave me the size of "God" and "Love" that I needed for my banner.
The letters then had to be copied the mirror-image onto Heat'n Bond Lite Iron-On Adhesive which I bought by the yard at the fabric store. To do this, I taped my "Love" and "God" facing out on a large window. The sunlight gave me enough light to then hold the Heat'n bond on top and trace onto the removable back.
The words on the Heat'n Bond are then cut out and ironed onto the backside of my material.
To finish the border, I ironed the crayon-colored letters placing a two thicknesses of paper towels underneath and on top of the muslin. (This is to protect my ironing board and my iron from the crayon.)
Some pretty, bright fabric for the words was my next quest. Can you believe they were also 40% off?!? Yes!
To make the border around the fabric, I printed off words from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, the love chapter in the Bible. I just entered them in to my word processor, selected the font that I liked, and printed them off. Since we were going to be coloring these, I chose to go with a block style font.
Placing the printed off words under the muslin, I traced the words onto the muslin.
(Hint: You will want to do this on a hard surface or place a cutting mat underneath as I did.)
I wanted to have a way that the students could be involved with making the banner, so I decided to have them color the outlined words on the border with crayon. Crayola brand works well. I avoided using the washable crayons.
The letters were a little more work, but not much. I used Picmonkey.com since they have so many more neat fonts to choose from than my wordprocessor. Since the size of each letter was so large, I didn't have to stick with a block style font.
The "is" was printed on one sheet of paper.
For "God" and "Love" I needed the words to be larger than I could print on one sheet of paper. Even printing one letter per page was not large enough, so blockposters.com to the rescue! I uploaded my files and created a 4 page wide by 2 page high poster for each word to print out. Piecing all the pages together gave me the size of "God" and "Love" that I needed for my banner.
The letters then had to be copied the mirror-image onto Heat'n Bond Lite Iron-On Adhesive which I bought by the yard at the fabric store. To do this, I taped my "Love" and "God" facing out on a large window. The sunlight gave me enough light to then hold the Heat'n bond on top and trace onto the removable back.
To finish the border, I ironed the crayon-colored letters placing a two thicknesses of paper towels underneath and on top of the muslin. (This is to protect my ironing board and my iron from the crayon.)
Iron for a few seconds in each spot with the iron at the cotton setting. Now the crayon coloring is set into the fabric and should be washable as well. I'm not intending to wash this banner ever, but if I did I would wash it on a gentle cycle to protect the crayon coloring.
You could use this technique for making a birthday banner, a welcome home sign, or for an anniversary celebration. Have you ever made a banner? How did you make it? I'd love to hear about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Let Me Know What You Think: