I’ve got few festivals coming up this Fall and Winter where I’ll be selling items under the name of Wearable Darkness. At most festivals and fairs, tables and booths have banner signs with the maker’s or vendor’s name on them. I didn’t have a banner. A paper banner wouldn’t last long. A store made plastic/vinyl doesn’t adhere to my shop philosophy of creative reuse when possible. So, I came up with the idea of making a banner out of the FabMo decorator fabric samples.
My goal was to create a banner that was earthy, tribal, textured and unexpected and made with FabMo materials and items I already had (no trips to the store) for no to low cost.
Here’s a quick write-up of how I did it. It took me 1.5 days of on and off work to complete. It cost probably about $1-$2 in thread.
I apologize for the poor photo quality. It was 96 degrees outside and inside my apartment the day I made this sign. I took the photos in the shade on my balcony as it was too hot to go out in the sun.
Step 1: Pick Suitable Fabrics for the Banner
Things I considered when picking out fabrics to use for the banner:
- High contrast between the letter fabric and background fabric, so the words would be easy to read.
- Letter fabric that doesn’t ravel easily. 100% felted wool would be perfect.
- Colors or patterns that represented Wearable Darkness.
- Two fabrics that coordinate.
- A background piece of fabric big enough for a banner.
The later criteria quickly limited my choices. I finally settled on these two fabrics:
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The dark paisley print is visually representative of Wearable Darkness and the fabric piece almost a yard long. The beige fabric was 80% wool that barely ravels. I would have liked a dark fabric for the letters, but I didn’t have any. The beige goes with a color in the paisley design.
Step 2: Make Your Letters
I’m not good at drawing giant letters, so I picked a royalty-free font in Word and made the letters as big as would print on a sheet of paper. I printed out the letters on scrap paper, cut out the letters and made stencils out of them. When picking out a font and making stencils, remember to:
- Use a simple, chunky font, so that you can cut them out and sew around them more easily.
- Make sure that the letters will all fit on your background fabric before cutting out the letters from the letter fabric.
Here are my stencils and a cut out letter:
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Step 3: Sew Letters onto Background Fabric
I used a long ruler to layout the fabric letters straight on the background fabric. I then used some craft spray adhesive I had around to glue the letters down. After drying overnight, most of the letters hadn’t stayed glued on. I was hoping not to have to sew them all on.
I pinned the letters down and sewed around them using a zig-zag stitch with heavy, variegated decorative thread. Regular sewing thread looked to wimpy on a sample I tried. The heavy thread looked beefy and tied the letter color into the background colors more.
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Step 4: Hem Banner
Originally, I had planned to just serge the banner raw edges to finish them as two of the edges were already serged on the sample. However, hemming added some weight and structure to the banner. The banner so far:
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Step 5: Create Hanging Tabs
Now, I needed a way to hang the banner. I got the idea to reuse the grommets that were already on some of the fabric samples. I found some brown and beige tone fabric samples with grommets in them that went with the banner fabrics.
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I serged and hemmed fabric grommet tabs. They ended up about 2 inches by 3 inches. They aren’t all the same because the grommets were all different distances from the edge of the samples. The exact size doesn’t matter to their functionality.
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I sewed the tabs onto the banner background. I put tabs on the bottom edge to add weight and also as a way to secure the sign if every outside on a windy day. Now I can use rope to hang the banner. Or the banner can be pinned to a table or display booth drape. I can braid some rope out of fabric strips in the future. Right now I don’t have any scrap fabric strips to braid.
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Step 6: Decorate Banner
I left the centers of the A’s solid because I was going to use old buttons for the centers to add dimension to the banner. The buttons looked a bit too small for the banner. The finished banner is about 42″ x 17″. Instead of buttons, I used leftover fabric to make flower centers for the A’s.
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I’m happy with my almost zero cost shop banner. It meets all of my original goals. I will probably add more decorative elements to the banner as time goes on.
Tips, Options & Things I’d Do Differently the Second Time Around
Having winged this process as I went along, here’s some advice for anyone else looking to make a shop banner from recycled fabric:
- Plan more. I was on a time crunch. Better planning would have made for shorter construction time.
- I would have picked I simpler font, but simple looked really kid-like. I paid the price when having to sew around all those curves.
- Skip the glue part. Go right to sewing on the letters.
- You could use letter machine embroidery appliques instead, if you have them. I didn’t want to buy letter appliques. I also didn’t want to have to hoop and un-hoop the fabric for all those letters. I think a sign with each letter being a different applique fabric would look really great. It would allow smaller pieces of fabric samples to be used.
- I tried a bunch of different decorative stitches to sew on the letters. They are much slower to sew than a standard zig-zag stitch, and none of them where big enough to be seen from a distance. On fewer and simpler letters, the decorative stitches might be worth it.
- Quilted letters would give the sign more depth. I didn’t have much time to work on my sign. If I had to do it over again, I’d quilt the letters with quilt batting between the letters and background material. And bind the edges instead of hemming.
- If you can hand draw your letters, it would be faster and allow bigger letters. I was limited by what would print on a sheet of paper.
- Fabric paint could be used to paint the letters on a fabric banner.
- For paper artists, the wallpaper samples could be used to make a banner.
- Keep you banner light enough so you can hang or pin it to a fabric table cover or back drape.