Crafty Banner-Making

So as I explained previously, I'm not very crafty. But no more! I have unleashed my inner pritt stick goddess and made these:

This project took me maybe an hour and a half? Not very long, although I started it in the morning and then had to go feed my mum's cats, and on the way back there was a thunderstorm so we drove around watching it.... so it didn't get finished until the afternoon.

Here's how it started!

I got the black paper, which isn't used in this example but will be used on a copy of today's work, from W H Smith's for around £1 each I think. The pritt stick and scissors I already had, and we had some leftover coloured card at work which luckily matched the colours I needed: red, yellow, blue and green.

I printed out each of the house crests onto A4 paper. Be warned, Slytherin especially looks very pixelated when you look at it on paper and up close, but I found if you stand back from it (and since I'm planning on hanging mine over a balcony, that made sense) then they look fine.

To make the rectangles of card look more like pennants, I cut a triangle out of the bottom.

To get them all the same size, I cut out one and then laid it against the others one and by one to mark where the top of the triangle came to. Then you just cut from the corners to the dot. Keep the triangles for later.

Cutting out the house crests was easy enough, until I did Ravenclaw. Fiddly! The wings of the raven jut out the top of the crest and created about as much cutting work as doing the other three crests together.

Those triangles now come in handy! I wanted to glue all the way up to the edges of the crests (especially on bloody Ravenclaw) but equally did not want glue on my table. So I used the leftover triangles as surface protectors.

To make sure they were all glued into roughly the same place on each pennant, I used a DVD case as a placemarker.

And behold.... the finished products!

I am veeeery happy with these, and plan to hang them over my bedroom balcony so that the first thing people see when they come in, aside from the floating candles (more on that another time) will be these hanging up.

My Saturday feels very productive :)

Getting My Craft On

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not usually the girl who makes everything by hand and can sew a button back on a coat with her eyes closed. I can barely tie my own shoelaces. Fabric scissors are both fascinating and deadly - I am not a naturally crafty person. Unlike my mother, who made a variety of costumes for me when I was a child, including a little mermaid costume with detachable tail. She has a sewing machine and everything. I have ebay.

Yes, generally I buy what I need. It's normally far better quality than whatever I could dare to make myself. However, there are some things you can't buy, such as signs for around the house that say things like 'Aragog's Lair'. Or a Hogwarts scoreboard, in the absence of reliable way to keep scores using hour glasses (damn you, magic).

So on Sunday I went and traipsed around the shops - I walked the entire length of the shopping centre in an hour and didn't find everything I wanted, but did find some things I didn't realise I wanted. I got a bag of sherbet lemons, some mint humbugs and some chocolate limes from Poundland for my sweetie buffet. I got a roll of brown paper and some string, for making packages for the outdoors display.

And I also got..... three big black sheets of card. Two are going to become Hogwarts banners - I've seen fabric versions online but doing it this way is going to cost me ooh, about £2, as opposed to £7 before post and packing. And the third one will be the scoreboard. I'm going to print off the house crests to stick onto each quarter, and then print categories to stick onto the board, and I've bought a gold pen that I will use on the night to write the points down with!

I can just about see it in my head, but it's going to be interesting to try and put it onto paper, especially since like I mentioned, I'm not the sort of naturally talented woman who can throw some glitter and glue at a scrapbook and have it come out looking like a professional job.

Updates and pictures possibly tonight or tomorrow! In other news, I went to T K Maxx and now have a visceral need for a glittery silver owl.