Pin Banner

A lovely, quick project to share with you today.  A few months ago my son received a small pin for his participation in stage crew and over spring break he did a lettering project to earn a high school letter for drama!  He's devoted many hours to the crew this year (at least as many as I have to quilting) and we're so proud of him.  He doesn't want a letter jacket, but he does want a special way to display his awards in his room so I offered to make him a pin banner.


He won't get the actual letter until sometime in May, but when he does all I have to do is sew it on and he'll have a wonderful keepsake.  Since he's very artistic too, we made this into a group project.  We looked at different examples of banner shapes and sizes online and he was able to measure a letter that was on display at his school.  From there, he made me a construction paper template of exactly what he wanted.


He was thorough enough to give me actual angle measurements and lengths, but I just used his shape as a template to cut out a red pentagon exactly the same size as his model.  I then cut off about an inch across the top for my black header section and put a black border on the entire thing - 2" across the top and 1" on all the other sides.  I trimmed the non-top sides to 5/8" after they were sewn on.

I made the hanging loops by folding a 12"x1" piece of fabric in half lengthwise and ironing it flat so there was a crease  in the center.  Next, I unfolded the fabric and folded the raw edges in to this center crease and then ironed it again.  Finally, I folded it in half and ironed it a final time.  This makes a nice, sturdy piece of fabric (four layers!) that is stiff without interfacing or raw edges.  I ran four lines of stitching along the length to hold it together (you really only need one but the others were for decoration), then I cut it into three equal pieces to make the loops.


Once I was done making the loops, I pinned them into place and then brown-bagged the entire banner!  This is why I added the black border onto the red, it looks like there is a binding around the entire banner but I didn't have to mess with non-square angles.  I did a few lines of straight-line quilting across the black part at the top to give extra support to the loops, then switched to red thread and ditch stitched next to the black.  I didn't want to stitch on the black because I wanted it took like real binding.  After that, I just had to hand-stitch my turning hole closed and it was finished!


I took this picture before I buried all my thread ends, but you can see that they are basically the same!  Best of all, it got the teenager stamp of approval!


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