It’s been a long time since I’ve picked up my paper crafting supplies to make something cute and fun. A couple of Saturdays ago I hosted a baby shower for one of my Sisters-in-Law (I have seven). It was a good “excuse” to break out my scallop scissors and dust off my paper trimmer. Seriously, I had to dust it off. How sad is that?

I wanted to make a cute decoration and with a baby shower theme of “baseball” I thought making a pennant banner would be perfect! I used the instructions created by Jenn in her tutorial over on Splitcoaststampers: Pennant Banner

As you can see, mine is a simplified version of the festive holiday one in the tutorial. I omitted letter embellishments and opted to string mine together by punching holes in each top corner and threading the twill tape thru them. This allowed for me to adjust the placement of the pennants. They are easily kept separated by the ribbon embellishments between each one. I found the cute designer papers in Michaels and the ribbons are various ones from my stash that went with the colors on the papers. I backed each pennant with an ivory cardstock and used my scallop scissors for the added design.

Yes, I love Martha Stewart.

Here you can get an idea of what it looked like hanging the full length of our ode to Ikea library area in the front room. We’re not addicted to these Expedit bookcases, why would you say such a thing? Just don’t look in any other of our rooms, or you’ll call me a liar. I blame it on Ikea for making them in such a variety of sizes and in white.

I’d also feel better if you’d ignore the poorly decorated tops of the bookcases. I’m working on it. Got some simple white frames yesterday so I can start adding more family photos. I’ll have to explain the photos that are currently along the top at another time. 😉

The favors were very simple but I thought they looked pretty cute. After all, everything looks cute in a cello bag! Each cello bag had a pack of Cracker Jacks and sunflower seeds. I really wanted to do peanuts and Cracker Jacks, but couldn’t find individually packaged peanuts. So I went for the favorite “baseball” snack of my Brothers-in-Law and got sunflower seeds to add to the bags. I did use peanuts as the guessing game. They were shelled and in a very cute milk can container that I found and wished I kept for myself. Haha!

I created the simple “thank you” banner using scraps from the pennant banner and the sentiment from the SU! set Family Phrases. Then I punched two holes to thread the cake tester pick thru and secured them to the cello bag with the twill tape. I used a cake tester pick because they are longer than toothpicks so it gave me more area to work with when tying the stick to the bag.

It was a lot of fun and I was quite tired from being up so late the week prior to the baby shower. But I found that these simple touches helped to pull the theme together and I didn’t have to spend a lot on pre-made decorations. Which is why we spend so much on paper crafting supplies and tools, right? To safe money? LOL!!