I've been inspired by all the cute uses for pennants at parties that I have seen in Blogland. They are so versatile and stylish.
I was put in charge of invitations and decorations for a party some friends and I are giving and decided to try pennants myself as a "theme".
This post is about the invitations.
I ended up with so many pictures, I did another post
about the actual party. You can see it here.
Of course, I wanted the invitations to be cute,
but I also wanted them to be as inexpensive as possible.
When I actually went to buy the scrapbook paper for the light blue and red color scheme
that I had decided on, I realized it would be cheaper to buy a pack of blue and white
scrapbook paper and add red accents to it. This pack of 24 sheets was on sale for
$2.50 at Michaels so each sheet was only about 10 cents each.
Because I wanted to be able to print information about the party on each pennant from my home computer and printer, I cut down the 12"x12" scrapbook paper into an 8 1/2"x11" size.
When you are drawing lines on scrapbook paper, put the lines on the back
side of the paper so that if you don't cut exactly on the line, the mark will not
show on the "good" side of the paper.
By making the pennant on paper that you can design and
print at home, you eliminate the tedious cutting out
of letters that is sometimes required of a fabric pennant.
I am a computer dummy but most computers have an easy program to set up the text.
This is a screen shot of setting up the text to be run on the cut down scrapbook paper.
...and here it is after being run through the printer.
The tricky part about printing on paper that will be a pennant, is that the text has to fall within the part of the paper that will not be cut away to make the pennant shape. .
I drew the eventual shape of the pennant on a piece of copy paper (sorry, it's already been used for
something else before...that's my contribution to re-cycling) to test that the text would all fit
on the pennant. This is an old-fashioned way of seeing layered things...to hold them up to a window.
The good thing about the pack of paper that I
bought was that it was already color co-ordinated.
This is a test run to make sure that the same pattern of paper would not
be side-by-side when the pennant would be assembled. I was making
three pennants since they would be posted in three different areas at work.
After the pennants were cut, they were glued onto
some already-on-hand red ribbon.
I discovered "Zip-Dry" glue when I was making my daughter's wedding invitations.
It holds well and best of all it does not "wrinkle" the paper like some glues do.
The little pockets on the pennants above were made to hold directions
to the party and also a "wish list" in case someone wanted to have an idea if
they wanted to bring a gift to the party.
Leave "tails" on the ribbon for hanging purposes.
I was running into a time crunch and about the only red embellishment source I had on hand
was the ribbon so I just cut it into little strips and added it to the pennants. Later on
I added more little red accents to "cute-it-up" some more.
Here is one of the invitation pennants hanging in
a break room at my work.
These invitations could even be folded accordian-style and
mailed for a party. Just leave a little space between each
pennant at the top for room for the ribbon to bend between
pennants.
Of course, the text could be adapted to any type party.
The entire pennant cost less than $1 each to make.
This same technique could be used for pennants as party
decorations too. I made another paper pennant
(but without text) for the front of the guest of honor's house.
I used the same papers for this outside pennant but was able to use the original
12x12 size since no text was going to be printed on these.
To see more party decorations with the using this paper,
click on "Paper Pennant Decorations".
This was the original header for this blog post.
I made a new one but need to keep this one in the post too in case someone had "pinned" it.
