Personalized Garland

A good college friend contacted me last week about adding a 'happy birthday' message to one of the sections of garland that I currently have in my Etsy shop.  The garland I have is great but the flags are fairly small so I offered to make something custom.... she gave me a great example of something she saw in someone else's Etsy shop and I just kind of ran with it.
Jennifer gave me the color scheme of yellow, pink, green so with that in mind I went to JoAnne's and was going to just buy a whole plethora of fat quarters - I found some really cute fabrics too.  But, at $2 a pop it would've been $30 just in fabric!  I figured I'd hold off and see what fabric and scraps I already had in my stash at home and I was so happy I did!  Those colors are already ones that I tend to buy a lot of when picking fabrics for myself so it was EASY to find a mix of fantastic fabrics.  From there I cut them (well, my Mom ended up cutting them actually) into 7.5X14.5 inch rectangles.  Then I added some medium/heavy-weight interfacing to one half of each rectangle.  Then using stencils I used some fantastic fabric paint by Tulip - it's velveteen and after you paint it on and let it dry - you use your iron to 'steam' it and the paint raises up similarly to velveteen fabric.  It looks so cool!!!  (Here's a link to more about this fun paint:  learn more about Tulip Fabric Paint Velveteen.

Then I folded each rectangle in half to make a square and sewed them inside out, leaving about a 4 inch section un-sewn to turn the fabric right side out.  Then I sewed a finishing stitch all the way around the squares in an apple green color to give it a more finished look.  Then using Brown wide double fold bias tape I pinned each 'flag' to the binding tape - leaving 12 inches at each end to easily tie or hang the banner and about 1 inch between each flag.

I am SO happy with how it turned out and I hope Jennifer is too!  This special garland is for celebrating her little one's first birthday - Happy Birthday Jane!