making sweet paper + fabric pennants

One afternoon while playing, My daughter Adelaide offhandedly announced that she wanted to "make flags for all of her friends". With this little comment, she inspired me to find a way to do just that.

We also found that they could be personalized with letters of the alphabets, and would make lovely cute + inexpensive gifts for the children at Adelaide's upcoming birthday party.

After brainstorming and a few prototypes, I was able to come up with a plan and template to make personalized pennant flags out of paper and fabric, and a few other simple materials.

These little pennants are quite simple to make and to personalize, but because I made 20 of them, I began several weeks in advance, working on a few in batches here and there. Because of this I found that they were quite an enjoyable project to work on.

If you would like to make your own paper + fabric pennants, I have created a tutorial, with all the information and steps you will need to do so. You will need to download it along with the pennant tracing template, and they are located here:

http://www.lovelydesign.com/downloads/lovelydesign_pennant_instructions.pdf

http://www.lovelydesign.com/downloads/lovelydesign_pennant_template.pdf

I greatly appreciate your thoughts and feedback! Please do let me know if you try these pennant instructions out - how it goes and if you have any thoughts on corrections which should be made, and how I could make them better.

In most projects I try to have my daughter "help" out as much as possible with both the decision making and crafting process. This is not always easy, and often requires incredible amounts of patience and preparation. And often have to catch and remind myself to chill out! But she loves to help so incredibly much, and I have found the rewards of teaching and making with my daughter to be phenomenal.

With this project, we took some time on an afternoon to simply make a project out of gluing the wooden beads onto the ends of the bamboo skewers, which we eventually would use for the "flag poles". Adelaide loved this activity and I found her to be really quite good at it - I found myself only having to trim the pointed ends off the skewers, and wipe any excess glue.

I also had Adelaide involved in the decision making with fabric and colour co-ordination choices according to each child. It is often very interesting to me to see how she thinks about things, and her reasoning behind her decisions - for example: "Nyomi is always smiling, so she should have yellow like the sun!"

I am hoping that my daughter and I will always inspire each other.

These little pennants were a hit at Addie's party, and they make lovely gifts for birthdays, special events, or for no reason at all! You can make one, or many, it is really up to you.