New Banner

Remember the "Creating Flags and Banners" article a couple months back?  Well since then we have purchased an old school overhead projector from eBay, created a few designs ideas in Photoshop, had those ideas printed out and finished up a new banner.

We started with four yards of 50/50 material (50% cotton, 50% polyester) bought from a local fabric store.  The width of the fabric is about 44 inch wide but we wanted something wider.  Not being a seamstress, we used an iron-on adhesive strip called Heat n Bond to join the two pieces together making a rough square about 72" high by 88" wide.   It was pretty easy and quick to iron the two piece together.

The fabric was then hung onto a wall with some duct tape and the overhead projector positioned to give us the size we wanted.  As we used a black fabric for the background, we used a silver sharpie to make the outlines.  This process went fairly quickly.

After the outlining process was completed, we took the banner outside and laid it flat on top of a scrap of cardboard, many to protect the driveway from any paint that seeped through during the next step.

Then we started the painting process.  We used 1/2 inch foam brushes to apply the white latex exterior paint.  Working from left to right, top to bottom to minimize drips, putting an arm in a freshly painted area, and knocking over a paint can, it was fairly straight forward.  With two people working one cut-in the outline, while the other covered the larger areas.  Some of the corners of the letters we a bit tricky with the 1/2 inch brush but we found that a white paint pen did a nice job of giving the sharp edges and cleaned up some of the line edges nicely.

He is a cost and time break down.

Cost:

• material - $9.00
• Heat n Bond - $2.50 but only used about a quarter of the roll.
• Paint - $6.50 for a quart of white exterior paint and used maybe a 1/2 inch out of the can
• Brushes - $.50 ea we used 4 

Time:

• joining material - 10 minutes
• outlining design - 10 minutes
• painting - about two man hours, but the cutting in the the letters was time consuming

So in about 2 hours and for a cost of about $14.00 we have a new banner, Defend the 'Baud!  We still want to hem the edge of the banner and add grommets to the the corners and center of the top and bottom but we feel it came out nicely.

Look for more projects coming soon.