Tutorial…. sorta… Thanksgiving banner

So remember how I was going to post every day with something I was thankful about? Yeah that failed miserably,  but I will have some thankfuls on another post soon, so don’t think I’ve completely forgotten.

Today I have a tutorial of sorts for you. Its silly simple so I don’t know how much it should count. I even have a free printable for you to go with it- simple decorated letters that took me way too long to make due to computer crashes.

Supplies:

• Book paper (I used an old dictionary)
• printed letters from this post
• scissors
• glue (I used the hot glue gun on this one)
• ribbon
• extra paper for backing
• ink pads if desired

I started out by printing and cutting out the letters. As a side note to anyone  familiar with Illustrator, they retain their edit-ability (is that even a word? well it is now so pbbbthththt) if you’d like to change up the colors. Anywho, the next step is to cut your pages from your book in half.

Then glue the ends of the halves together to make a longer strip. This is going to vary a bit from book to book, but I needed 3 half sheets to get the right length for the rosettes. Start folding accordion style.

You can line up the definitions to look really cool if you use a dictionary. Just remember about the road to hell and good intentions and such because sometimes you end up with this instead.

Yeah that was a bit unplanned… oh well.

Once you’ve got your sheets of paper accordion folded, overlap the two free ends and glue them together.

This makes a nice tube which you’ll be folding down flat to make the rosettes by bringing the edges of one side together.

please ignore the chipping nail polish

camera happy? who me?? couldn’t be!

Glue a piece of random paper or cardboard in the middle to hold the edges of the page together.

Flip it over, ink the edges of the paper and attach your letter of choice.

Repeat with the rest of the letters.

To attach them to the ribbon, line them up carefully with the letters straight up and down or else you’ll end up with a bit of frustration when you have to repeatedly reposition them after gluing them down only to find out they were crooked. Of course I would never make that mistake, but some people might……

Glue a nice piece of paper over the ribbon (I actually covered these with neat circles after the pic) that overlaps onto the pleats to hold the ribbon in place.

How you attach the letters is up to you. This was a spur of the moment project for me so I used two pieces of ribbon and made a tiered banner, but you could attach them all to a single length to make a longer piece, that part is entirely up to you. Now all you have to do is hang it and I’m sure you can do that on your own so no pictures for that step.

Have fun with this and if you make one, I’d love to see it!