American Themed 60th Birthday Banner

As part of the surprise 60th celebration for my mom, we decided that I would make a banner to hang on her mantle. I’ve made a few banners with my Cricut, but I wanted to up the game and do one with a few more colors and layers. Celebrating mom’s birthday over the 4th of July meant we were going with a red, white & blue theme and my banner was going to follow suit!

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American Themed 60th Birthday Banner

What you’ll need:

4 12″x12″pieces of blue denim card stock
3 12″x12″ pieces of red gingham card stock
3 12″x12″ pieces of white card stock
1 12″x12″ piece of gold glitter card stock
Cricut Explore Air 2
Spatula tool
Glue stick
Hole punch
Twine

I started by going to the card stock aisle at Hobby Lobby and looking at all of the card stock until I had a design in my head. I found 4 styles / colors that looked good together and went home to work on the rest!Next I opened Design Space and started working on a banner design. I found a banner template from the Bits and Pieces theme (#MFB16F) that was a great starting point. I decided to use the blue card stock as the back piece, the red gingham as the middle banner piece, white as the smallest banner piece and gold glitter letters on top.

To make sure I had the letters the right size, I kept the smaller banner piece as a template and resized each word to make sure the letters fit right, then clicked the button to break the word into individual letters and cut it on the glitter card stock.

Since the glitter card stock is more specialized, turn your dial to custom and choose the glitter card stock option from the dropdown to make sure the Cricut cuts the card stock right.

After the banner pieces with the letters were cut, I opted to do some white & blue banner pieces with a star on them to divide the letters up. I cut 2 of the large banner pieces on white card stock and 2 of the middle banner pieces on the remaining blue denim card stock. Don’t remove the blue card stock from the mat – you’ll be cutting the star out next.

To get the star cut out, I inserted 2 star shapes on the mat and placed them where the middle of the medium banner piece would be. Next, I cut the stars on the same pieces of card stock that I just cut the banner pieces on, then I used the spatula to remove the banner pieces , sans stars.

Now that everything is cut out, arrange the layers on top of each other and glue each layer together, starting with the back two.

When the pieces are glued together, use your hole punch to put 2 holes in the top of each banner piece.Now all you have to do it thread some twine through the holes and you have a banner!

I was so proud of my fancy banner and couldn’t wait to get it hung on her mantle. We put the ends of the banner under the 2 heavy candles on either side of the mantle which held it in place.

It looked great with the additional decorations and was the perfect backdrop to several meals, snacks and family hang outs in mom’s living room!