It's A Girl Banner + Tips...

I've been working like a 'busy bee' these last few weeks before Christmas! So since I have a few new creations and some helpful tips to share, I'll be brief because I plan on posting several tonight...squeezing it all in before the New Year!   First up is this festive and girly, shower banner!

I had originally started out with an argyle pattern, and even after I stamped all 10 banner cards in argyle, I decided it just wasn't working for me!  I went back to my 'stamping board' and came up with this little number...POLKA DOTS!  If you've followed my blog for even a short period, you'll find me using polka dots A LOT!  They're so versatile and stripes are also a great compliment to polka dots!  For the top border I 'scrunched' up some crate paper(party streamer paper!) and glued it down with a 1 inch strip of certainly celery cs.  On top of the cs, I used a chocolate circle border and strategically cut it just so...evenly spaced out for room to add a few rhinestones!

For the lettering, I tried something NEW!  Normally on my banners I use regular old cs for the lettering...not today!  I knew I had some espresso chocolate vinyl in my stash so I thought I'd give it a whirl!  I have to say, I may start using this a whole lot more than cs now!  It goes on smooth and I don't have to double matte the letters like I normally would with regular cs.  If you're not comfortable sticking the vinyl on 'blindly', you can use line contact paper like I did below with the 'G'.  Letters with a lot of curve can sometimes be tricky to get on straight and I can't tell you how many times I've had to re-cut letters!  Go with the contact paper...especially with extra curvy fonts.

Sweet little embossed star!

A quick tip!  When you're punching holes in the banner cards, simply put 2 cards 'back-to-back' and  you'll get evenly lined up holes for every card.  Once you have 2 cards punched, use 1 as a guide for the next card and so on and so forth!