A "Banner" day

When I saw the banner project featured in last year's July Country Living magazine, it took me about five seconds before I ran for my purse and jumped in the car to head to the craft store for supplies--I loved it THAT much! And since I knew I would be visiting my mom over the Fourth of July, we decided to have a fun little joint crafting session and make these adorable crepe paper rosette banners.Well. When's the last time you made a craft that elicited swear words? I can answer accurately: last July. What we had was a fun joint crafting session all right, however it turned out to be not-so-little. The editors at Country Living need to employ the services of a technical writer or at the very least check out one of the myriad paper-crafting magazines in the market and learn how to write coherent, specific, step-by-step instructions that don't leave your readers confused and foul-mouthed after trying to guess at what they're supposed to be doing.


Though we worked on them for several days, neither of us actually finished our banner. I know I was so frustrated when I got home that I stuffed the pieces in a box and figured I'd just deal with them next year. Well, next year arrived a few weeks ago when I dug out my box of patriotic decorations and found my rosettes waiting patiently. A year away from them definitely gave me fresh inspiration and a willingness to tackle them again. The last hurdle to getting them done was figuring out a way to hang the rosettes, a subject about which the magazine article was again maddeningly vague. I finally figured out something that would work and although it wasn't perfect (colored crepe paper+liquid glue=not a good idea, something I clearly repressed from last July) for this project my mantra has become "DONE is better than Perfect!" I got the banner finished and hung in no time, so now I can share it with you!

The original article called for hanging the rosettes from a chain made of sparkly pipe-cleaners. I have far better things to do with my time, and I had a much better option: this cute Americana tissue-paper garland by Bethany Lowe. Much easier and much cuter, in my opinion. I hung up the whole thing with push pins (no one is tall enough to see the holes I left in the wall) and to cover up the visible pins on the ends, I sewed up a few little rosettes using some red/white/blue striped crepe paper streamers.

I quite like the banner now and I'm glad I made it, even though it was a headache-and-a-half! Mostly I'm just glad it's DONE! (as always, you can click on all pictures to enlarge them.)