Sewing up a Christmas Banner for my Red Front Door!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

As you may recall I have happily received a major amount of fabric and notions from Grandma Powell. (92 year old Mother of my late first husband.)  Included was a stack of holiday sewing.  I have started into the stack, first by laundering everything and next by selecting the first things I plan to make.  Yesterday afternoon I took a large Santa Banner, about 34" x 42" and decided I would add batting and a backing and machine quilt the major parts of it.  Thus far I have joined the sides and bottom and left the top open.

I also made a trip to Michael's and found jingle bells to sew onto the sleigh and some metallic cord I may use to embellish the reign's with to set them apart a bit more.  We will see about that one.

Basically you place the right sides of the backing and of the banner facing each other and then pin on the batting.  Take great care that all of the sides are evenly matched and pinned.  I started at the front center of the bottom and sewed across to the corner then repeated from the center front to the opposite corner.  The purpose of taking this approach is you do not want to have any slack or fullness or twist in any of the layers if you can help it.  This method helps reduce that likely hood.  Next I sewed from the bottom corners to the top.

I have left the top open to help pull out any fullness when I create a casing at the top for a dowel rod by which to hang it with a red ribbon on our red front door.

I just finished and hung Santa on my door and I like him a lot.  Mostly because it is a bit different than hanging a wreath.

I used a 1" wide gross grain ribbon as seam binding and stitched it across the top of all three layers on the right side of the fabric overlapping 1/2" and stitching 1/8" from the lower edge of the ribbon.  Next I used the dowel I had and laid it across the top to see exactly how far down to turn the fabric to form the casing.  Next I pinned it and sewed across the entire top forming a perfect sized casing.

For fun I used a darning needle threaded with 1/8"  wide red satin ribbon and just sewed them in place along the reindeer's harness.  There are 10 lovely jingle bells to announce someone at our front door.  I found some white fake fur left from making bunnies tails and thought it perfect for the sleeves of Santa's coat.  Just a dab of fabric glue and a bit of a trim and it worked perfectly.

This project was an ad lib all the way and that made it fun.  I will start another soon!