Hello everyone! I hope your holiday season has been carrying on merrily. We have these target stocking hooks that we put on our shelf/mantle every year, but unfortunately, they don’t really seem to hold any weight. They work fine for empty stockings, but if you try to put anything in the stockings, they flip right off the shelf. No good. Anyway, I came up with another spot to hang the stockings, but I figured the hooks would work perfectly for hanging a banner on the shelf.
I enjoyed making my Thanksgiving banner, and with all the crafty materials I had laying around, including a lot of leftover twine from the last banner, I figured I’d try my hand at a christmas banner. I might try something more involved in the coming Christmases, but for this year I thought I’d start with something short and simple – “NOEL”. We also got a printer recently, so instead of stenciling letters, I took a much easier route…I made the banner on Adobe Illustrator and printed them on card stock.
(Sidenote: Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator can be prohibitively expensive, at several hundred dollars a piece, but once you learn how to use them they are seemingly invaluable. Luckily now you can get these programs and a bunch of others for a monthly subscription rate rather than paying the full amour for creative suite which is like, a couple thousand bucks….totally worth it in my opinion!).
I didn’t want the outline to show through so I did a mirror image of the text. I chose Gill Sans Ultra Bold as my font – I was trying to keep it simple with some thick, block letter text.
My cutting mat is nowhere to be found so I used a stack of newspaper. I cut out the letters with an X-acto knife. Scissors would work, too, but the X-acto knife is MUCH easier. BAM – there you have it…NOEL! 🙂
Then, yes, I cannot seem to get away from glitter – I decided to try my hand at glitter once again. I sprayed each letter with spray adhesive, let the adhesive get tacky for exactly 2 minutes, and then i covered the letter with glitter. I tapped the bottom of the tray all over the place until the letter was evenly coated with glitter. DO NOT touch it! It will totally make it smudged and horrible looking. I learned this the hard way.
After they dried, I flipped the letters over on some newspaper and lined them evenly with the twine.
Then, I took a glue gun and put glue around the entirely of the twine to hold it on…
There you have it!! I think the letters could use some dimension, and maybe next year I will do a different word/words, different font, or add some extra layers or other trim, but for now, this is a good first try! 🙂
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