The one upside of my sister living far away, is that she needed some of my help to get stuff together for my bachelorette weekend.  Since she was flying down, and I live close to Savannah, it was easier for me to make some stuff for it.  And we all know that I was actually thrilled to have an excuse to play with the Cricut 🙂

Lauren had a bunch of ideas of decorations she wanted, and sent me links to them.  One of them was a banner that said “Last sail before the veil.”  I was pretty excited to make my own version of it and one Friday night my sister and I were designing and making the banner together via pictures and texts, hundreds of miles apart.

Bachelorette Banner

What you’ll need:

• White & navy cardstock (6 pieces each)
• Cricut
• Glue
• Scissors
• Twine
• Tape

First, I needed to come up with a strategy to make the banner.  I decided to get navy and white card stock, and layer it so the top layer had cut outs, and the back was solid, with those colors alternated whether it was text or filler between words.

Next, I made a banner template in Design Space.  They had a basic flag shape that I liked, and I resized it to work with the 12×12″ sheets of card stock I bought.  Ultimately, I wanted to get 6 “flags” per sheet.  I used the Cricut to cut 19 plain white flags, and 3 plain navy flags on the card stock, and laid them out on the floor.

Now the fun part 🙂  I needed to cut the flags for the top with the cut outs on them.  These were either going to be letters or anchors.  I added the letter / anchor to my template in Design Space, made sure it was going to cut them correctly, then started cutting.

After these were cut, I removed the inside part, then put the cut out flag on top of the plain flag to see what it’d look like.  I saved the extra letters and anchors to reuse another way, but you can throw them away if you want.  Of course Cleo had to see what I was doing on the floor… and sit on them.

Once all of the letter and anchor flags were cut out, I was pretty happy with what they looked like!

Now glue the top and bottom flags together.  I didn’t have any normal glue on hand, so I used mod podge and a sponge brush.  I think regular glue would be a little less messy though..

After those were all glued together, I let them dry over night.  The next day I attached them to 2 pieces of twine using tape: ‘Last Sail’ on one piece, and ‘Before the Veil’ on another piece, so they could be hung below each other.

I wanted to send Lauren a picture of the final product, so I taped them to our mantle to see what they looked like, before packing it away.

After the first banner was done, I had all of the cut out letters saved, so I decided to make another banner!  I cut out some plain white flags, and glued the letters on top (this time using a stick of glue).

When we got to the beach house, we hung them up before everyone got there!

Bam! Two banners for the price of one — Not too shabby for $10!