A Tale Of Pinspiration, Although Not Really

 

So last year Kelly had a Show Us Your Life about Holiday Traditions and I found the blog of a family who celebrated Chanukah. And I envied admired their awesome Chanukah banners. So I pinned them to inspire me to come up with something fun for this year's Chanukah decorating. Here were my Pinspirations.

I was so inspired, in fact, that I made my own super-amazing (ha!) Chanukah banner this year. It seemed like a sign to begin when I got a Michael's flyer with not one, but TWO 50% off coupons. I bought a handful of the supplies I thought I needed -- scrapbook paper in shades of blue, sticker letters and some ribbon.

Then I decided I wanted "circles within circles" for my letters to be on so I found two circular shapes around the house -- a Tupperware container and a bowl. I determined our family's official spelling of "Chanukah" and cut out thirteen circles of the scrapbook paper. ("Official spelling" is because Hebrew is transliterated so there are a number of different spellings of Chanukah/Hannukah/ Channuka/etc.)

Then I added the sticker letters to the circles. Since I didn't have enough capital "H's" to make all the letters capitalized, I just mixed them up a bit.

 

Then I went back to Michael's and bought blue card stock at 50% off. Yay! I cut thirteen circles out of that as well.

 

I just used regular white glue to put the scrapbook paper circles onto the card stock.

 

Then I decided all my ribbon was completely wrong for this project so I headed back to Michael's and found some silver elasticized cord that fit my needs perfectly. Since I don't have a single-hole punch, I just used a pen to poke the holes for the cord to go through. I made the cord for "Happy" shorter than I made the cord for "Chanukah." Then I tied the two cords together and taped my banner to the dining room wall. I did this a week before Chanukah started, by the way, because I was so proud of my creation and I absolutely love how it turned out. (And that night it fell off the dining room wall at around 1am and spent the rest of Chanukah adorning our piano.)

The only annoying thing about this project were my many (many!) trips to Michael's, but that was mostly my own fault because I was indecisive about ribbon and wanted to save money by using coupons which were valid on different days.

I am looking forward to this banner being a part of our Chanukah decorations for many years to come. And to top off the awesomeness of this project, Dave folded all the extra scraps of paper into six-pointed stars which I used for further Chanukah decorating, as you saw a couple of days ago.

And now I'm trying to figure out what other holidays I could make fun banners for. Groundhog Day in shades of green and brown, anyone?