Easter Banner

My long anticipated Easter banner is finally done. Bonus: I finished it in time to use it as an Easter decoration this year!

I completed the stitchery in 2002. I knew I wanted to finish it as a banner with prairie points, but I'd never done the technique, so was hesitant to attempt it. So the needlework lay in my "stitched but not finished" box for over a decade and a half. That, my friends, is a lot of indecision.

Since one of my 19 in 2019 goals this year is to get at least six of those items finished and ready for display, I knew this banner would be one of them.

I finally buckled down to learn how to make prairie points. It's simply folding a square of fabric point-to-point twice which creates a right triangle. Then you sew the raw edges into the seam of your project. The single-folded edge gets tucked in between the double-folded edge so that the base of the triangles slightly overlap.

The trick was to figure out a happy proportion of the size of the prairie points to the size of the banner. But that meant I first needed it figure out the size of the banner. It's a numbers thing. I'm great at following specific directions. But when I have to figure out the steps myself, I sometimes have trouble with measurements and proportion. Dale, my numbers guy, gave me some ideas on how I might go about determining my finished size. It worked like a charm -- plus he double-checked my math.

I wanted to have a prairie point at each of the bottom corners, as well as the sides and bottom. The instructions I was using for prairie points didn't have that detail, so I made it up as I went along. My corner points are a little small, but not too bad for a first attempt.

Earlier this year I bought a "lot" of about eight banner hangers from a local gal through Facebook Marketplace. They are decorative wire hangers with a wooden dowel as the hanging rod. Each wire topper is a different design. This tulip definitely sings "Spring" and is the ideal topper to my Easter banner.

My banner is filled with some quilt batting to make it puffy. I folded the top of my banner around the wooden dowel, then sewed it into place.

I was thrilled to finish my banner just days before Easter, and before I'd be out of town waiting for baby Annalee's arrival. I was able to display my banner in our dining room this year, and look forward to hanging it for many future Easters.