I made another set of banners, with a variety of trimmings from other projects, and some black and white fabric I found tucked away. But the customer who ordered banners got his. I already made my own (the original prototypes!). I don’t need another pair. Now what?
There’s always some leftover from the process of making these banners, and, for a variety of reasons, it’s almost always black. (There is some white leftover, I admit. But making a bag out of white fabric is silly — it practically attracts stains, rather than shedding them. The goal here is protection, not ruin of the object while in the bag).
So I made a bag for the banners I made. I have an intended recipient in mind, of course, but there’s always the chance that before I give them away, that someone orders a set. And then I can make another pair, right?
I should always make a bag for these things, anyway. It’s not a lot of extra work, maybe 45minutes to an hour. No one wants them hanging up all the time, either; they want to be able to take them down or put them up as appropriate.
Techniques
In the process of making this banner set, I learned a couple of useful techniques. I used one square, correctly cut to form a ribbon or band (green), to use as a template for planning the cut of a second band to match.
This kind of thing is tricky to get right. Fabric is floppy; it doesn’t behave well under certain circumstances: triangles and regular shapes are challenging, at best. The best thing to do with such things is zig-zag stitch them, but I prefer the look of appliqué, so that’s how I do mine.
The other thing that I learned, in the process of making these banners, is what a difference quality fabric makes. The last set of banners I made, I used high-end cotton fabric. It had a richness to it that’s hard to duplicate, where richness is defined as a thickness and a strength and a polished finish to the cloth.
The fabric that formed all the elements of the appliqué was of this higher quality.
But these banners came about because I was cleaning up and reorganizing my stashes of fabric, and I came across the white and black yardage that I would need to make a second set of banners. Fabric’s provenance? Unknown. Felt good enough, I guess. It wasn’t really see-through… It should be all right?
Not so much. The fusible interfacing didn’t adhere to it quite the way it did to the higher-end fabric. It came out all right, but not beautifully. Maybe it’s the moisture in the air because it just rained, or maybe the fusible interfacing didn’t have as much to hold on to. Either way, it turned out less than ideally as a surface to build the banner’s appliqué upon. Something to remember going forward.
