I love the look of those triangle pennant banners.  I have made paper ones before and they are so cute, but thought I would make a fabric one that I could use over and over again.  This was super easy and I probably had the cutting and sewing done within an hour or so.

Pennant Banner Instructions:

Materials:

• Coordinating fabric (or paper)
• Ribbon to mount the triangles on
• Sewing Machine/thread
• Measuring tool and scissors or rotary cutter

I ended up with 5 different fabric patterns and purchased .2 of a meter of each, for this project.  This enabled me to fit 2 double-sided triangles per piece of fabric (ie I would have 2 completed triangles from each fabric for a total of 10).  To be honest I didn’t even measure these.  I had a paper pennant banner from another occasion and just used one of the triangles as a guide.  The originals were cut from 8 1/2 X 11″ paper with the top of the triangle extending the whole width of the paper and the point coming down to the middle of the bottom of the page at 4 1/4″.  When making the fabric triangles, I set down the paper triangle guide and used my rotary fabric cutter to cut through the double thickness of fabric (with wrong sides together).

The photo makes this look a little lop-sided, but it actually isn’t.

I simply sewed a zigzag stitch down the sides of the triangles to the point, and left the top open. I was not concerned about the stitches showing, so I kept the wrong sides together and sewed on the “good” side.  I wanted my triangles to have two “good” sides so that when they blew in the wind, there was no back or “bad” side.

After all 10 triangles had been sewn, I laid out my ribbon and pinned the triangles on about 6 inches apart.  I then sewed the tops of the triangle to ribbon.  (I did not sew the tops together before as I really didn’t see a need to double-stitch them.)  My finished banner stretched about 12 feet or so, with some swag.

Finished Pennant Banner

The fabric banner was super easy to make and much more durable than paper.  To be honest, the $8 cost (got the fabric and ribbon on sale) was not much more than fancy paper and it will obviously last for many years.  I actually tried to pick colours that I thought were a bit more neutral, so they could serve different purposes and would look good with the strange colour of our house (not my pick).  Happy sewing!

Pennant Banners Continued…

You can do some really cool things with these banners.  When making paper banners, it is fun to add lettering and coordinate for a birthday party theme or other celebration.  We used one at our teacher appreciation lunch this year.    There is a great tutorial at Plucking Daisies.

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