Halloween Paper Banner

Halloween / Samhain is almost upon us, it is one of my favourite holidays and it always ends up the one I have the least preparation time for, with it being exam season. Every year I say I will make fabric banners so that we can re use them but time just runs out, so this year I have made an easy paper banner.

This is one of many dictionaries we have in the house, it is old, battered and broken with many missing pages. It was only fit for the recycling bin really but I am always reluctant to bin things that may have other uses, so I have been using it for crafts. Making gift boxes, paper flowers, for drawing and painting on in an altered page style, journalling and mixed media art and herb labels to name a few things, and now this banner...

First you will need to ready your printer and find a font for your spooky writing, then just print the letters out onto your old pages. The above pages were just used as test sheets to get the printed letters in the right place and to work out the size of the flag, once you are happy, mark and cut out the shape of the flag. I decided to age the paper to give it a spooky vintage feel by dabbing a used tea bag around the edges of the flags.

As you can see above the tea bag leaves an old brown mark, good for making treasure maps too. Then fold the top over a piece of wool or string and glue down, I have used a glue stick here as it is just paper.

That's it... one completed banner, just hang it up. You can really go to town here if you want to, as long as the printer will print on your old paper you could print in colours or spooky pictures.

My husband also made a banner making the lettering look a little spookier than mine as you can see above. He has printed out the letters with added cobwebs, bat wings, ghosts and some kind of splatter effect.

This is a close up of one of his pages, we decided to make these flags a slightly different shape to the first ones but they are fastened to the wool in the same manner.

 This is what both banners look like on the wall, it should enlarge if you click on it. This is an easy paper craft all letters and pictures could be painted or drawn on if you have no printer. It is also very easy for small children to paint their own banner for a Halloween party centre piece and hang spooky things on it.