Halloween Mantle, Banner & Silhouette Cameos

 This is the first year I decorated my mantle/shelves for Halloween.  I blame my good friend Christie!  Tomorrow I will show you why, but I believe I've met my crafting soul mate!  Wait till you see her mantle for Halloween...anyhow, she inspired me!

So most of the stuff on the shelves I already had for my annual Halloween party for the kids, but I needed stuff for the mantle, and cheap!  

First I made the banner.  It's very easy and super inexpensive.  You just buy a couple of different patterned scrap-booking paper, usually about $.29 - $.59 each.  Or you can buy a whole pack of themed paper on sale for $9.99 at Michaels!

You measure the paper, which is usually 12x12.  Then you make 3 even marks on the top and 3 on the bottom at the 3", 6" and 9" spots.  After that, you continue to use your ruler by playing connect the dots and drawing your long lines to form what looks like 2 triangles, but turns out to be 3...one is upside down now. :)

Then you lay them all out on your floor and hot glue a ribbon to the top of each.  Super easy!

P.S.  Keep the 2 extra pieces and make mini pennant banners with them to place over a cake or as a centerpiece on your tablescape.

I also have wanted to do my children's silhouette faces for over a year now, but never made the time.  I thought silhouettes would be perfect for Halloween so I forced myself to sit down and do it even though it scared the crap out of me.  You have to use a cutting mat and an E-xacto knife to make these and that is what scared me most...I'm not a freaking surgeon!

I had each child stand sideways against my white walls.  I made sure to take photos of them going in each direction in case I wanted to change things up later.  Then I printed them out in black and white and laid them on top of black scrapbook paper, the heavy card stock type.  Then you very carefully and slowly start cutting out their outline.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I had to redo 2 out of the 4.  I wasn't happy with doing it twice, but I wanted to keep these forever so I did want them perfect.  Long story short, it ended up being a lot easier than I thought.  Glad I had a few minutes of bravery!

I also bought the 10x13 frames at Michaels because they are an odd size and were $5.99 as opposed to the $40 11x14 frames.  The only problem with that is they don't offer standard colored mats for a 10x13 so I did have to dry brush the mats with an acrylic orange paint (2 coats).

I think they turned out great!

Now I can change the mats out with different colors to go with my different holidays...that makes me giddy!

Happy Halloween!

DIY Felt Pennant Banner No Sew

The last day of school is on Monday and I wanted to make a pennant banner that I could use to decorate with outside.  And I thought since I was going through the trouble, then I wanted to make one I could use over and over again but was inexpensive.  Scrapbook paper has great selections of colors and patterns, but it's not that durable.  Fabric is great but most likely I would have had to sew.  So I felt that FELT was a great choice for this and here's the final product!

So I bought 12 pieces of felt (size 9x12) for $.29 each at Michaels.  This banner cost me $3.28!  I already had orange ribbon (a 30 foot 1/2 inch wide ribbon that cost me $2.67 at one point).  And I already had a glue gun and sticks.  This project took me about 1 hour to cut it all out and hot glue together.

Start by folding your felt in half and use a white piece of chalk or crayon to mark the 1/2 way point.

Then fold each side in to get the other 2 lines.  Mark them.

See where to mark them? 

Then you make your first cut from the top corner down to the first white line.

Then you just keep making diagonal cut to make 3 nice triangles.  The 2 pieces on the ends are just scrap materials now. 

 Then I laid each piece out (in rainbow order) and used a memory stick (2" long) to measure quickly between each pieces while I hot glued the felt to the ribbon.

  

It ended up making a 24' banner for $3.28 and 1 hour of my day!  I'm so happy I can reuse this over and over again!  I love primary colors for parties and this will work perfectly for our "Beginning of Summer" party!