Ok, so you may know that
Craftster was at Renegade Chicago! Since I'm the resident Chicagoan, I was in charge of getting things ready. One thing we definitely needed was a great banner. Leah showed me a banner she'd made for her store Magpie by using fabric.
I lovvved the idea!
I went to Jo-ann and got colors/fabrics that I thought would be suitable. I got a combination of fleece and felt, but really I just went for whatever color I liked best and didn't really have a preference for one or the other. I got:
3 1/3 yards (about 10 feet) of white felt for the background of the banner
1.5 yards of black fleece*
1.5 yards of teal felt*
1/4 yard of baby blue felt
The rest of the fabric came from my stash
a tiny scrap of leopard print fabric
2 sheets of beige felt
1 sheet of dark brown felt
a scrap of gray felt
*The black and teal where both way more than I needed!
But I needed a template... So I got high res copies of the Craftster logo and of the striped shirt girl and had my boyfriend blow up the images in photoshop. I'm assuming this is easy.... I don't do Photoshop..
He made the file 9 feet by 2 feet. (This ended up being a little bit too large, so I'd suggest making the height a little smaller!)
I took the file to Kinko's and $13 later I got this! Color was unnecessary as this was just a template so I got black and white.
(I was over eager and didn't get a shot before I started cutting it out.
)
As you can see, I started with the logo (because it was the easiest!) and just cut out the general shape to get at it, then cut it down to the edges. (I took out the inner white bits after this pic.)
Since the logo itself is only two colors and the outer portion of black in continuous, I was able to lay this down on my black fleece and trace it. As you can see I did it backwards, although I think that's more force of habit than necessity, since fleece is basically the same on either side. Of course, if you're using a printed fabric it would matter which way was up.
After tracing
The finished product from this step (needs to be ironed! yeesh.)
My oversight committee
Ok, now that I had the black portion out I could cut out the gray portion of my printed logo. As you can see there are some letters missing. Both t's and r's are exactly the same, so I just saved myself some time.
Then I traced them onto my blue felt. Again, since there's no real nap I just put them down however they best fit.
Checkin' out my handiwork
Then, I layed out the black piece and pinned all of the corresponding blue pieces to the top, trying my best to keep the same sort of shadow as the original logo. Then, I tacked them all down with fabric glue and then sewed them all into place. I
HIGHLY recommend doing the extra step of gluing! It was definitely worth it!
Icky close-up but you can see how close I tried to be to the edge. I didn't want my stitches to take away from the design, I wanted them to blend in as much as possible.
After this, I decided to go back and start working on striped shirt girl. Mostly because the idea of placing the logo before the girl was even done was just ridiculous to me, partly because I do the easiest thing first.
That being said, this girl was NOT easy! I took days trying to figure out how exactly I was going to pull this off. I only had one template for this girl, but tons of different pieces! What I ended up doing was taking a regular sheet of paper, putting it over the original template and tracing the exact bit I wanted to work on. The girl is actually still completely intact!
This is my first in progress shot of her. As you can see, I'd already done the stripes of the shirt, the general shape of her face, arms, and book (which I kind of messed up on.
) You may be able to see that some of the stripes are attached to each other in my version but not in the template. I did this to keep the shape until I was ready to glue it down. I cut them out right before I did that.
(notice my swank pin cushion from
Modus Operandi?)
I always imagined this girl as a blonde, but for the
life of me I could not find a suitable blonde fabric in my stash. So dark brown it was. You can see I also made glasses out of some leopard print fabric and since I couldn't think of a better way to do it (embroidering would've been risky) I just traced her features directly onto the felt. I actually ended up re-tracing them with a darker pen later and ruined the first face!
I wanted her to have pupils and irises but I didn't want the fabric to stick up to far. My solution was to cut out her entire eye space, then put the smaller pieces underneath her entire face. This obviously only worked because I had a white background! You can also see her fancy eyebrows and scissors in this pic.
I sewed on the shirt but only around the sleeves for definition. I felt like if I did that all over it would've been too much. I also added small stripes with just a straight stitch
I gave more definition to the book/paper by using a zig-zag stitch. I also emphasized her digits with a pen.
Her hair was too much of a helmet, so I cut out tiny misshapen triangles t make her hair seem more like hair. I also used a lighter color colored pencil to add "highlights"
Ok, now that the logo and the girl are done, I try my first shot at laying out the pieces. As you can see, something's not quite right. The blue bar of "table" just doesn't translate well.
I had a stroke of genius. I really don't know why I thought to do this, but I'm glad I did! I had to glue down the girl in separate pieces, being careful of which went down first. Some at opposite ends having to go down at the same time...
I wanted to tack down the logo and the circles with glue, but I ran out! No one would probably notice but the logo itself is a little wavy in some places and this is partially why. Hence my previous recommendation!
Finally! Here it is in action!
So yea, it took a LONG time, but really it was so worth it. We'll be able to use it ostensibly forever and it's a great representation of the logo if I do say so myself!
So that's my wordy little sort of tutorial. If anyone has any question, please ask away!
