Valentine's Banner

I'm going to admit that I have never been a lover of Valentine's Day.  Perhaps it was a childhood with all birthday gifts influenced by Valentine's-themed items (my birthday is the week prior).  Perhaps it was what felt like an eternity of being single.  Who knows?  I just wasn't into it.  But I am excited about the trend of banners.  And the Mothers & Others group I'm in is having a Valentine's party for the kids, so I volunteered to make some decorations.  I'm going to share my process here!

First, I cut some "chip board" I had to the triangle shape of a pennant.  CTMH has pre-cut, pre-hole-punched banners for sale, but I needed more letters.  The flaw of my method (besides the time to cut, measure, etc.) is that the product I used is much flimsier than the CTMH banners, so it's prone to warping.  But I did use up some stuff I've been hoarding, so that is good!

Next, I decided on my papers.  I am trying to use up the stock of stuff that I've just been holding on to.  So some of my papers are older.  If they contained Tulip or some shade of pink, they were on the block for this.  I used Jingle, Cherry-O, and Amore.  I also introduced some of the NEW Sophia paper too!  I have some OCD issues, I think, so I had to plot things out.  All the As would have to have the same paper.  As I only had three different sets I was using, I decided the As and the I would be on the same paper combination.  The Es and the Ys would be on the same.  The consonants would be on the same paper.  I began by tearing the papers into strips, like the following picture shows.  I also used a water brush to "paint" water on to the edges of some of the pages and roll them, to expose the backside of the paper and add some other dimension to the project.

 In order to make things easy for me, I decided to adhere the papers to some Baby Pink base pages I had (still part of my hoard).  These have their own patterns, but they would mostly be covered up by the torn pages.  Still, any exposed parts would show something more interesting than just a solid color.

The next two photos show the paper adhered to the base page(s).  It was a little random, sometimes using the "front" side of the paper with more vibrant colors and sometimes using the "back" of the paper, which has a mono-tone pattern in a percentage of the color on the front.  I really wanted to have the layers shown.  The second picture also shows some of the rolled edges.

Next, I adhered the pennants onto the back of the base page in "random" patterns so that I got maximum triangles on the back and would create banners with a variety of patterns of diagonals, verticals, and horizontals.  I specifically didn't want each one to be symmetrical (mostly because this would show any flaws in my work!).  Here are some of the pennants before I started decorating them:

I needed to organize the "patterns" so that there would be variety as the words were constructed.  Planned randomness?  This is part of my OCD...

Then I started decorating.  I punched holes and set eyelets to reinforce the holes and attached the pennant flags with Hemp.  I used a variety of embellishments (all from my hoard...yep, I'm using them up!) to create different dimension and interest on each triangle of the banner.  I used my Cricut to cut out the letters in Tulip CS and then ran them through a texture embossing folder.  (Actually, Verona helped me while Vincent was in the pool for swim lessons at the Y.)  I inked each letter with Chocolate ink on a sponge applicator and adhered them with 3D foam tape.  Here's what the banner looks like strung up by the fireplace in the living room of this terrific house we are renting:

And here are some close-ups of the details.  You can see that I made some accordion paper flowers (this is in the Sophia paper that premieres on February 1), some scallop circle flowers (CTMH introduced a punch for this too!), have used some Dimensional Elements (the hearts) decorated with pearl paint mixed with Tulip re-inker for some color and sparkle, buttons, Sparkles, ribbon.  I might go back and ink the edges of each pennant with Chocolate, but right now I'm just going to enjoy this!  It's my first banner.  And I'm addicted!  Am excited to make more using the CTMH banner, because it was tedious cutting the bases myself (and then they curled up a bit when I attached the papers).