heart banners

Inspired by this project - I decided to make our own Heart banner that we could take out year after year for Valentine's Day.

I took it a few steps further by hemming the sides, and creating a full pocket for the dowling. I just winged it. I'm not great at sewing, so just kind of went with the flow and guessed sizing, cut the dowling at Home Depot and screwed in the little eye hooks in by hand. I cut a large red heart and sewed it to the banner using a matching red thread.

It isn't that easy for a newbie at sewing to sew at this size. The heart is buckling in a few areas and the banner is far from straight on the edges. Meh. I still love it. :) You need to do these kinds of projects to get comfortable with a machine in my mind. If I was a perfectionist, nothing would get done in our house!

I used a nice weight of fabric from Fabric land and some pink and red fabric I found there too. The white canvas fabric wasn't inexpensive, but because I wanted it to be pulled out year after year, I wanted it to be a nice weight. You could easily use lighter fabric.

While I worked on my big one (the very first picture) I made Oscar mini banners that he could decorate himself using glue. For his mini banners I didn't use downling, or a lot of cord... It's much simpler this way. No dowling needed.

So although the sewing of the heart in my first banner makes it look beautiful - it was really hard to make it perfect. A lot of muttering curse words under my breath happened. So here is another way.  Oscar and I decorated a second large banner (below) with more hearts and glue. And it worked just as well. And potentially more fun because Oscar and I could do it together.

Anyhow, I told you this was my favourite day to celebrate! So many fun projects to do.

Things you need:
Dowling (You can skip the downling if you want to do mini ones like I did for Oscar)
Brass Eye hooks
Fabric, White for banner, red and pinks for hearts
Sewing machine (Or not, you really could do this without any sewing)
White Cord for hanging