Announcing: Pin Banner!
It's summertime at last! If you have school-aged kids, then I'm sure your May was filled with end-of-year concerts and celebration assemblies too. My high schoolers are active in drama and two years ago, my oldest and I designed a banner to display the varsity letter he earned. This year, my middle child lettered for the first time and asked if I could make him the same thing to display his letter. As I was measuring the original banner to reverse engineer how I made it, I thought "I should write this down in case my youngest wants one in a few years too," which turned in to me writing this project pattern!
It's been a while since I wrote up a project pattern, and it was fun to write
something a little less involved than a full quilt pattern. This little
project can be finished in a single afternoon, with very little hand sewing (aka, there's no bias binding to make and attach).
Pin Banner is sized to fit one letter perfectly, with some negative space
around the letter to leave room for pins to denote extra honors earned in
subsequent years, but not so much negative space that the banner looks empty
if it's only a letter. In the case of the "K" banner, I'm displaying some of my magnetic needle minder collection!
If you don't have a varsity letter to display, you can make a pin banner for
anything you want to show off! My mother-in-law made this red and white
banner and is planning on adding a blue denim star to use as a Fourth of July
decoration. I made the gray and navy banner to display the collection of
random pins I found laying around on my son's dresser.
Pin Banner only includes instructions for one size of banner, but it's
written in such a way that you can easily make the banner in any size you want
without changing anything except the amount of fabric you need. You
could also piece a design for the main section of the banner (Meeple banner
anyone?), though you will need to quilt it if you decide to go that route - as
written, the pattern assumes sewing on the letter or attaching the pins will
hold the banner together.
To celebrate the release of Pin Banner, you can get 20% off all project patterns in my BluePip Designs shop with coupon code VARSITY until 6/23/25 (this includes project patterns and single quilt block patterns). You can also find the pattern on Etsy if you prefer to shop there. Thanks for stopping by!
Comments