Daily Creativity: Be Awesome! Banner

Our oldest niece turned 13 in August - THIRTEEN!! I can't believe how fast time has flown! We wanted to gift her something special for her bedroom, and decided on making a custom banner, predominantly using Lawn Fawn's Stitched Party Banner and Finley's ABCs dies.

For this project, I used papers from a paper pack I found at Michael's that had fun summery neon designs. We chose to use the glittery chevron paper for the circles, and from there, decided on the papers they would be mounted on for the banner, making sure the chevron circles would 'pop' and not blend in with their background.

I started by die-cutting the larger Lawn Fawn stitched party banner from all of the patterned papers, including three of the chevron pages to use at the start and finish of the banner, and in-between the two words. I already had three of the flamingos from Lawn Fawn's Gnome Sweet Gnome that were colored with watercolor pencils and die cut with the coordinating Lawn Cuts dies, and they worked perfectly on the chevron pages to separate the words.

For die-cutting the chevron page, I setup the stitched circle die with the exclamation mark die and the larger stitched party banner die as shown here, so I could run it through the machine and complete a few steps at once. I repeated this process with the stitched circle die and the other letters to spell out my sentiment, which cut the use of the die-cut machine in half since I was able to die-cut the letter from the center of the circle at the same time as cutting the circle.

I then die-cut all of the letters out of a scrap of black Paper Source coverstock in order to make the in-laid die effect on the circles. One benefit of doing this is I had the full custom sentiment - be awesome! - die-cut out of the chevron circles that I didn't need to use for this project, so I kept them aside for a future project.

The next four pictures show how I installed the in-laid die-cut letters into the circle shapes.

I flipped the circle over and placed a piece of tape across the full opening for the letter. I then flipped the circle over, and placed the in-laid die-cut letter in the hole, pushing it against the tape on the table top to get it to stick effectively. With the B, A, and O dies, I made sure to hang on to the chevron bits that go in the middle of those letters, so I could install them as well and have a completely finished panel.

Here's the completed sentiment (minus the exclamation mark, which I decided to add later).

To finish everything out, I arranged the large stitched banner shapes on our guest bed and moved patterns around until I was satisfied with how the finished project would look. I then used foam squares to adhere the flamingos to the chevron spacer panels and to adhere the circle letters to the banner shapes. And finally, I threaded it all together with pink embroidery floss in a complementary color.