St. Patrick's Day Banner

Okay, so I'll be honest here. I would've had this post up about 3 hours ago, but I got sucked into Pinterest. Every. Single. Time. It's a complete time suck. But I love it just the same.

In fact, this project wouldn't have happened without Pinterest. I made this project based on merging things I liked about three different banners made by: Rebecca at Simple as That, Tanya at twelve O eight, and Kim at The TomKat Studio for HGTV.

In my quest to increase our holiday decor, the goal for this year is to make a minimum of one new project per major holiday. (I'm not counting things like President's Day or Arbor Day here.) I've already met my one minimum for Valentine's Day, so St' Patrick's Day was next on the list.

Making a paper banner (or bunting, if you prefer) like the one I made for Halloween was the easiest of the options, so it was a natural choice for the first project to tackle...especially since I just got done being sick.

The supplies are simple and inexpensive. You'll need: scissors, book pages (I had some tea stained pages left over from the wedding flowers), green paper, chipboard letters or stickers, some form of adhesive, jute, and a stapler.

I'm all about making things easier on myself, so I used my Pazzle to cut out my shamrock shapes using a clipart file. If you have a Silhouette or Cricut, this is totally the way to go. If you don't have one of these handy machines, print yourself a template from a similar file on the internet and simply trace and cut as many cute little shamrocks as you need.

I trimmed the sides and tops of the book pages to keep the page mostly filled with words rather than blank space. I then trimmed out a triangle shape from the bottom of each page (use a template to keep your shapes similar).

Layer your shamrocks on top of the pages and adhere using your preferred method (I used a tape runner), then adhere your letters to the center of each shamrock. I spelled out "lucky", but you could easily pick whatever term you'd like. This stage took me the longest because I am terribly indecisive and went through four different lettering options before I settled on the black sparkle ChipChatter.

I made one extra shamrock page for each side of the banner as bookends, so to speak. I decorated these with two minibuttons each, again adhered with the tape runner.

Side note: Check your pages before you start gluing them together. I caught a lovely piece of profanity right in the middle of one of my pages (directly below the shamrock stem) just before I stuck everything together. That would've made it interesting.

Lastly, you'll need to string up your individual pieces. I folded the top 1/4" of each page to the back and adhered the jute in between the back of each page and the folded section. To make extra sure they didn't come undone, I placed a staple diagonally at each top corner to hold the jute in place. (I used a box of staples to help me keep the distance between each flag at a standardized length.)

Now just find a nice spot to hang it up and you're all done! Easy peasy. I love crafts like that!