Felt Birthday Banner

Originally published on March 24, 2010

H is for . . . . . Happy Birthday Banner!

 We have recently had a Birthday. A BIG Birthday, in fact. Not too long ago, LM turned 3.
And prior to his Birthday, as I was wandering around the blogosphere, I found not just 1, but 2 fantastic ideas for making Banners for Birthdays or other Holidays. One was found on Rosy ~ Posy, and the other was on Nurturing the Tender Years. I thought it would be fun to make a Birthday Banner and start the tradition of hanging it up for each person's Birthday in our family. It took me a while to get it all done, but I finally finished it the morning of LM's big day! (Phew!)

I mostly followed the superb tutorial on Rosy ~ Posy, with a few variations. Here is how I did it!

First of all, I used felt for all of this. I used 4 colors to cut out triangles that were about 10 inches long, 7 inches wide.

I used a large cup to give me the right size for the white circles. I traced the cup on the white felt, and cut out 13 white circles. 

I typed up the letters for HAPPY BIRTHDAY in a word document. 

(I used the Arial Black font at about size 200.) 

I printed it out, cut out the letters, pinned them to navy blue felt, and cut them out.

 I decided to just stitch the letters onto the white circles by hand.

 For me this was the easiest way, since I've done a lot of hand-embroidery. (Thanks to my Sister-in-law, Sarah, for teaching me!)

Then, I used dark thread to stitch the white circles onto the triangles. 

It took me a while to try to figure out how to connect all the triangles together. As I mentioned above, I was sort of in a time crunch trying to get this done before LM's B-day, so after testing a few ideas, I finally just used navy blue yarn. I tied knots and stitched them onto the corners of each triangle. I'm sure there are plenty of better ways to do this, but it was quick and easy, and it got the banner up in time! Ha ha.

And there you have it!