Banner Finished

It's done! I finished the Christmas banner. I was itching to move on to a new project but told myself that was unacceptable since the banner was so close to being finished.

I took the cut dowel to the deck, covered a section with newspaper and spray painted it.

I had thought about leaving it natural but decided spray painting it would add a bit of pop to the finished piece. I have a can of white spray paint that I'm using for another project but white just wasn't what I wanted. I remembered having a can of a metallic color somewhere in the basement but couldn't lay my hands on it. Oh well, white is good, too.

Then last night, looking for something else (Isn't that how it always goes?) I found the metallic color. It's bronze and boy does it look good.

I really hosed that puppy down. I even remembered to spray the ends. There was a breeze last night and I worried a bit about drift but nothing got on my nicely painted deck. I left the dowel outside for a couple hours to make perfectly sure it was dry.

The next step was to make the casing for the dowel to slip through. I measured down an inch on the front and back of the banner and pinned a line.

Back.

Front.

Then, I folded in the corners, folded the tops down on both sides and repinned the whole thing.

I whip stitched the top closed. I only sewed along this top line. You can't see the hand stitching when the banner is hanging. Here's the nearly finished product.

The bronzed painted dowel complements the shading in "Welcome". That hadn't occurred to me when I was painting the dowel. No, really. It didn't. I just didn't want white. I love these serendipitous events. It makes me look like I knew what I was doing all along.

I bought a piece of yellow cord to use as a hanger. It's a bit heavier than yarn but I love the color of it. Knotting it and hoping it will stay on the ends was just a feeble hope. I needed to anchor the cord to the dowel. I settled on stapling it. After spending 45 minutes searching, I gave up trying to find my heavy duty staple gun. I'll find it when I'm looking for something else. So, I brought the banner to the office today because I know we have a staple gun there.

I looped the cord around the dowel and stapled it.

The hard part is getting the staple square into the dowel. I think I'll add some glue to the cord, staple, dowel intersection tonight when I get home, just to be on the safe side. As I envision this will be used just for a month, the staple probably won't ever come out, but let's be sure.

Here is the finished banner.

Finally, after years of sitting in the "Finish Me" pile, it's done. I like it. I hope my friend does too. I probably should send it right around Thanksgiving and tell her this is one package she can open early.

Beverage:  Edinburgh's Finest tea

Deb