New Year's Inspiration on the Mantel with banner tutorial

With me, and with the rest of the family too, out of sight is out of mind.  I need to have something in front of me to remember what I'm doing or what I need to do.  We've been talking about goals and new year's resolutions, including making some individual and family goals, and I wanted to have something front and almost center to give us some encouragement and to keep us thinking about them.

So I thought I'd make a simple banner.  The nice thing about this is that it can be mass produced in stages.  It took me an hour or so at the most to do all of this except paint the small frame.  I did that the night before.

I used "the sweetest thing" line from My Mind's Eye because I love these colors.  I use them in a lot of projects (even my blog background!) the corals, reds and pinks mixed with turquoise-y blues.

I started by using the paper cutter to cut out 4x6 inch rectangles from a few sheets of the paper.  

To make the banner shape I just set the short edge of the rectangle against the measuring grid lines of the paper trimmer and marked two inches up in the center.  Then I stacked two or three pieces at a time and hand cut the wedge with scissors.

Then just lay out the banner papers in an order that looks good!

This is the time to put the details on each piece of the banner.  I knew that I would have the letters D R E A M B I G , and I wanted to have two extra pieces to make 5 above and 5 below, so I stamped the letters with these chunky foam stamps onto white cardstock with  coordinating ink.  Using a small cat's eye shaped ink makes it easier to get full coverage without getting ink on the background of the stamp.  Then I trimmed to a quarter inch of each letter.

Adding some ink or paint around the edges of the different elements give them a little bit of dimension and even more color.

When done with each of the banner pieces you can clip them onto a string or wire, like I did on the frame, or punch holes and tie the pieces together to hang up.

This is on the mantel with the other "motivational" sayings.  Hopefully it will help us to keep on track!  And for your listening pleasure, the song that inspired the banner:

I'm sharing here:

The CSI Project

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