Banner Making 101

I have been having some very interesting Facebook exchanges with my niece Amanda. It turns out that our churches are using the same Lent worship series! We had a discussion regarding visuals and I thought I would share the progress that has been made at our end so far.

I am going to continue to add to this post as the visuals proceed rather than creating new posts, so keep checking back here if you are interested.

Our first step was deciding on the format. Each Sunday in the series will discuss one of the names of Jesus as found in the gospel of Mark. We decided to create bookmark shaped banners displaying each weeks "name". This suggestion is given in the Reformed Worship magazine containing the worship series....how you create it is up to you.

What we used:
-brown kraft paper
-sea sponge
-paint pucks (brown and black)
-measuring tape
-yardstick (or in our case a 6' legth of doorstop....I'm not fussy about my staight edge!)
-paint brushes
-white paint (I'm using left over trim paint from home, and we'll try the primer...it just needs to be white...you could get little bottles of acrylic paint from Dollarama too....)
-water and a margarine tub

Our design is a bookmark shaped banner, made from brown kraft paper. We will distress the paper by giving it a brown wash and then crumpling it. The names of Jesus will be written on each book mark shape starting in the lower right hand corner.....so the sentence starts at the bottom and reads up the long side....I can show that better than I can explain it....stay tuned.

We are using a roll of kraft paper, it happened to be in our supply room. We are using paint stir sticks to staple our banner to. Stir sticks are 14 inches wide. The paper is 36" wide. I drew lines on each 9' strip of paper where the words will go, one guideline for lower case letters and one line for upper case letters. After I drew the lines on, my faithful friend and visual partner, Winnie....those are her beautiful hands, added a brown wash .( I think they are servant hands and that is what gives them such beauty. )
We happen to be working on the kitchen counter that I cleaned this morning. I had my trusty spray bottle standing by for the cleanup after wards....it took no elbow grease at all...which is a good thing because I used it all up on Wednesday afternoon....but that's another story for another day, and then only if you ask for it:)



Our worship visuals are not usually stunning in their sophistication. Our motto is "Keep it simple sister". We also try to make recyclable visuals and our favourite materials are paint and paper. But wow....what you can't do with those things. We love using plain old paint pucks but acrylics work well too. We mixed the brown right in the trays in the sink and made a nice pigment wash in a margarine tub, using the brown and the black. We then used a sea sponge to apply the wash to the paper and then tore the paper into two strips. You can get two strips out of one 36" x 9' length. Then the strips were crumpled into a ball and laid out to dry. The strips are now prelined, and distressed and have this wonderful organic look to them. The material is very earthy and organic which is keeping in character with the nature of Lent. We had thought about using burlap and white cutout letters. We would have borrowed someone's "cricut" for the alphas but our thought process brought us here and we always believe that the thought process is Spirit led. We strip away the green, growing and decorative things from the sanctuary....it is bare and we journey on the dark, heavy road of suffering to Good Friday, which is followed by the wonderful, celebratory splendour of Easter.


We started with the banner that has the longest name on it, and decided that it would have two rows of text. This way all the text would be the same size rather than having different sized letters on every banner. We're big fans of consistency. We also made one extra length...since we sometimes make boo-boos. The Easter banner will be white and a different format but that can be tackled a few weeks from now....so look for it here in the future....:):)


Wow...you are now zooming into the future...it's already Saturday. Phase Two has taken place. This morning we wrote the names on a sheet of paper, photocopied them onto a transparency and engaged the third member of the visuals committee....our trusty overhead machine. Powerpoint is wonderful but it can only take you so far. We projected the list of names onto the wall, lined up our prelined, distressed banner strips and traced the names on in pencil.

See?!?! Now you can see how the words are going to read up the side. (Much easier to show than to explain.......)

Winnie and I painted on the wonderful large island in the kitchen at church. You'll note that I found a great chunk of cardboard in the recycling box but for some reason none of our paint tubs are sitting on there, and neither are our brushes....we love danger. Preprinting the names, and then tracing them led to a nice consistency in our size and spacing. We thought that our paint technique with the lettering was different but in the end you couldn't tell which ones Winnie had done and which ones I had done. It's a good thing.

The final step, and one of our favourites....is adding a bit of age by spritzing the banners with a light wash in a bottle. It doesn't add a lot, but it adds a bit. The original brown wash ended up drying a lot lighter than we anticipated....about the same shade as the bottom of your socks after holiday to PEI. The black spritz is just a light wash made with the paint pucks and it dries nice and light as well, so very subtle. (Disclaimer- no carpet was ruined in the spritzing phase of this banner making operation....)

Stay tuned for the third and final installment where we give the letters a second coat of paint....Cloudwhite by Benjamin Moore, for those who were wondering....I know some are too shy to ask....my counter says many of you are reading, but to shy to say so:):)




























Today is March 3rd, Hockey Day in Strathroy! It was also Card Making Day at Coffee Break, and Picture Taking Day in the sanctuary. The pictures that follow are some shots of our sanctuary, how the banners look hanging at the front and at the back. I think they speak for themselves :):) ....so I won't offer up the 1000 words..... The first one is how the banner looks hanging at the front, small and plain. The second one is how it hangs in the sanctuary...unfortunately you can't see that it hangs a mere 9 feet above the worshippers....I'm off to pick up a car full of boys at school and go off to hockey!!!