Gather a few fun supplies (glitter! felt! hot glue!) and get ready to transform a cereal box into a lovely DIY Spring banner you can use to welcome the season year after year .
After a long Winter, the arrival of Spring is cause for celebration. One of my favorite celebration decorations is a banner. A banner can be customized and embellished to fit any style or occasion. For this DIY Spring banner I incorporated upcycled materials, glitter, pipe cleaners, and felt flowers. Read on to learn how to make your own colorful and unique DIY Spring banner.
Gather Your Materials
For the pennants:
- Cereal box (or cardboard if you prefer)
- Pages from an old book
- Scrap paper
- Alphabet stamps (foam or rubber)
- Ink pad
- Glitter
- Ribbon
- Large eye needle
- School glue
- Glue stick
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Xacto knife
- Ruler or t-square
Check out this post for my list of My Top 10 Go-To Tools for Crafting ~ I use a lot of them when making banners!
For the embellishments:
- Pipe cleaners
- Felt
- Buttons
- Tacky glue or hot glue
Make The Pennants
Cut Out The Pennant Shapes
Determine the shape of your pennants. For this banner, I chose a mix of circles and pennant flags. Triangles and rectangles also work well. Create the patterns for the pennant shapes on a piece of copy paper and then cut out the pattern shapes.
Use a pencil to trace a total of six pennants onto the chipboard. I like to try to incorporate a straight edge when tracing my pattern (less cutting).
Cut out your pennant shapes.
Cover The Pennant Shapes
Use a glue stick to cover one pennant with glue on the plain side of the chipboard.
Attach a book page onto the pennant, making sure the page is larger than the pennant. If you’re using large pennants or small pages, you may have to overlap more than one book page.
For a different look, you could choose to cover the pennants with patterned scrapbook paper.
Let dry for a few minutes to give the glue stick a chance to adhere.
Turn the pennant over and carefully trim off the excess book page with an Xacto knife with a new/sharp blade, using the chipboard as a guide. If you don’t have an Xacto knife or if you’re working with young children, you can use scissors for trimming. I prefer the Xacto knife because it leaves a cleaner edge.
Repeat until all six pennants are covered and trimmed.
Note: The chipboard pennants may curl a bit but usually flatten out after they’re completely dry. You can substitute recycled cardboard for the pennants to prevent the possibility of any curling. I prefer chipboard as I find it easier to work with and less bulky and I don’t mind any curling (it adds character😉).
Add Glitter Letters
One of my favorite ways to add letters to my banners is by using alphabet foam or rubber stamps as a guide. If you don’t have any alphabet stamps or would prefer an easier/faster way to add letters, consider using stickers, die cut letters, or hand cut letter from glitter paper.
If using different shaped pennants, now is the time to finalize the order you’d like them to be in your finished banner.
Select your stamps and stamp the letters S-P-R-I-N-G onto the corresponding pennants.
A few tips: use an ink color close to the glitter color you’ll be using and put the ink onto the stamp rather than pressing the stamp onto the ink pad for a cleaner impression
Next, fill in the stamped letter with school glue. The technique I use is very similar to flooding a cookie with royal icing: outline first and then fill in the letter with glue using a toothpick or wooden skewer to spread the glue and fill in gaps as needed.
This method takes a steady hand and a some practice. Try stamping a letter on a piece of scrap paper and do a trial run. You could also stamp your letters on separate pieces of paper and add to the pennants afterward as a separate layer. That way if you aren’t happy with a letter you can just make another rather than ruining a pennant.
Next, add your glitter. Be (very) generous. I decided to use two different shades of green glitter for my banner.
Place your pennants somewhere they won’t be disturbed and let dry for several hours, ideally overnight.
When the glue is completely dry, tap of the excess glitter onto a piece of paper (I try to put the extra glitter back into the container, usually with mixed results🤪).
Use a small, dry paint brush to clean up the edges of the letters by brushing away any remaining excess glitter.
Embellish The Pennants
Now it’s time for the fun part: embellishing!
Outline The Pennants
First, outline each pennant with pipe cleaners.
I chose this green color, it reminded me of flower stems. Working on one pennant at a time, cut separate pieces of pipe cleaner for each edge of the pennant and attach them with hot glue. I found that a small pair of side cutter pliers (from a set of jewelry pliers) worked much better than my scissors for cutting the pipe cleaners to length.
Felt Flowers & Leaves
Next, gather several different colors of felt and make a variety of felt flowers.
I followed this easy tutorial from Paper & Stitch for the fringe, loop, and wavy rosette flowers. I substituted hot glue for stitching, just gluing along the felt edge as I rolled each flower.
For the petal flowers I used precut felt ribbon from Hobby Lobby (similar to this: felt ribbon).
I like to “floof” and fluff the felt flowers a bit to loosen them up.
Accent a few of the flowers by adding a button center with hot glue.
For leaves, I freehand cut several different sizes leaf shapes from three different shades of green felt I had on hand.
Once you have your felt flowers and leaves, it’s a great time to lay out the design of your flowers. This allows you to play around with how things look before gluing anything down.
I like to take a photo on my phone for reference.
Punch Holes
Next, use a hole punch or Crop-A-Dile to punch two holes in each pennant. I use the smaller size hole but a standard hole punch will work as well ~ though the Crop-A-Dile goes through layers of chipboard/cardboard/paper very easily.
Attach The Felt Flowers
Now it’s time to heat up the glue gun (again) and attach the felt flowers and leaves, using the reference photo as a guide. For the most part, I glued on the flowers and then filled in with the leaves.
Add dimension to a few of the felt leaves by folding them in half and adding glue to the bottom of the leaf:
String The Pennants
Finally, it’s time to turn the pennants into a banner!
Layout your pennants and determine approximately how much space you want between each one. I kept mine fairly close together. Cut a length of ribbon about twice as long as the total length of your pennants.
Thread a large eye needle with the length of ribbon
Starting with the S pennant, put the threaded needle through the hole in the top left corner, working from the front of the pennant to the back. Then bring the needle through the hole on the top right of the pennant, from back to front.
Slide the S pennant along the ribbon to the left, leaving a ribbon tail for hanging on the left end.
Continue stringing the pennants in the same manner, adjusting and sliding them down the ribbon to your desired placement. Keep an eye on the ribbon as it can twist, if that happens just gently flatten it (or embrace the twist).
Once all six pennants are strung onto the ribbon, adjust the spacing as needed. Create a hanging loop on each end of the ribbon by doubling over a short length of ribbon and tying a knot.
The Finished Banner
Hang your DIY Spring banner from a mantel or as part of a vignette and enjoy for years to come!
xo,
Jen
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