BONUS - Fall Leaf Banner
Hey there!
Felt is one of those craft items that I try to always have on hand. Any time I go to a fabric store, I pick up discounted felt. Normal price can range from $.25 - $.60/square, depending on the brand, thickness and sometimes color. I catch them on sale for half price or discounted pieces for $.05 or so.
You can use felt for some many things. And for some reason I go through felt like water for my fall projects. I always need "just a little piece of felt". I decided that I wanted a fall leaf banner made out of felt because, well, it's an easy project!
All you need is various colors of felt, twine or cording, sewing pins and a leaf template. Besides that, you need a good pair of fabric scissors. I have a pair that I keep in my sewing box and I only use them on fabric. They weren't super expensive (because, can you say 50% off?!) but I don't want to dull them by cutting paper regularly. These are the scissors that I'd probably invest in getting them sharpened if a good deal on sharpening came along.
1. Your fall leaf banner starts with finding a nice leaf template. The one I found was from livecrafteat.com. Don't get side tracked by the great crafts and edibles that Katie has on her page (because you will!). If this template doesn't tickle your fancy, you can find several templates if you just put it to the Google!
2. Once you find the template that you like, you can either pin it to the felt as a whole page or, if you want to save felt, cut each leaf out and pin them individually to the felt. I found that when I did it that way, I saved about half of the sheet of felt. That meant more leaves out of each sheet!
Side note; I purchased 6 different colors of felt and used 5 leaf templates. Can you say a lot of leaves/overachiever? For my loose banner I used 13 leaves. If I huddled them slightly closer I could have used 16. My back door is 6' 4" for reference. If you are adorning a small space like mine 2 or 3 pieces of felt is probably enough. If you want to decorate then entire living room then do what I did!
3. Once all of your leaves are cut, take the length of twine that you want to use (add a few inches to either side for a loop) and begin adding your leaves to the twine.
You can tie the leaves to the twine or glue them to the twine or even get cute clothes pins and hang them from there. I did a combination of tying the leaves to the twine and clothes pins that I found at Hobby Lobby. I know that you can find cheap ones at Dollar Tree but I wanted these darker wood ones. And, in a matter of transparency I discovered that the clothes pins were heavy and flipped the leaves the wrong way. To remedy that I used some blue painters tape and taped the clothes pins to the wall but I could have gone with smaller clothes pins and that would have been just as cute.
If you are making a longer banner and want to tie the leaves to the twine, I suggest doing it in segments. You can always glue a leaf to the joint if you don't want it to show but it's rustic so showing wouldn't be so bad.
And that's it! Super easy, super simple. The time consuming part was cutting the leaves out. It took me 30 minutes but I could have cut the amount of leaves in half for this project and I only would have been cutting for 15 minutes!
