Praise God from whom all blessings flow - a banner

Wow, it been ages since I've written on here. Life has been so busy with the daily challenges of family life and lots of crafting added in too. The exciting news is that I have finished my first banner - yay! Our church moved back into our newly renovated building on Sunday and it was such an exciting day. It's a fantastic place which can be used by so many people in our community now. It's such an opportunity to bless others.

So, here's my banner. It was running around in my head for ages and it finally came together on fabric last week. I've had lots of lovely comments already from friends at church.

It started out as a patchwork of different fabrics which I ironed onto a backing piece of calico using Bondaweb. I bought a complete roll of Bondaweb before I started - 30m should keep me going for a while.

I did some free-motion stitching around some of the squares as I didn't completely trust the Bondaweb and had images of the whole thing peeling away from the backing cloth half way though a service. The stitching is completely invisible once you take two steps back from the banner, which is something to bear in mind for future projects.

I projected a line drawing of the church onto the banner and drew around it with a pencil before painting over the lines using brown fabric paint and a fairly thick paintbrush. I drew around a few of the kids at Sunday school and cut out the paper to make stencils. I used some spray inks from my scrapbooking stash to make the silhouettes (with varying success - Maya Mist doesn't seem to like fabric much).

The letters were traced onto Bondaweb (reversed) and then ironed onto black fabric before being cut out.

There is a backing of very heavy calico behind the banner to give it weight so it would hang nicely and then the edges were bound with red fabric.

I now have a team of 7 people to help me with the next banners, which are going to be Christmassy and (hopefully) quite sparkly.

Here's how our church looks now...