birthday banner swap...

It seems it's been about a gazillion days since I last updated my blog (well, OK, maybe not quite that many, but it's close...). No good excuse, just that life sometimes gets in the way of best intentions!

Many months ago, one of the Scrappy Girls had a birthday (yeah, YOU Cathy!) and the rest of us decided that instead of making cards to go along with the gifts, we'd make banner pennants. Actually, I kind of instigated this because I am soooo not a card-maker. My friends make beautiful cards- full of detail, artfully crafted, made with love. Me? Not so much. In fact, not only do I usually not make their birthday card, I've always got the ugliest gift-wrapping. No kidding- if there were a pile of gifts sitting there, they could probably each pick out the one that I brought. Anyway... a banner-maker I most certainly AM!

So here's the deal- we took a standard size of 5"x7" so that there would be continuity. Each one of us made her a birthday-themed pennant that she could string together and hang up. The theory here is that by the time she's about 100 years old, she'll have a lovely reminder of how much we love her. Not just on her birthday, but always! She loved the surprise of the banner pieces and we all decided that this would now replace the handmade birthday cards. Whew! Good news for me. The other bonus? We all decided that it was so much fun, we'd make them for all holidays!

Barbi's was a mix of my very favorite bird image, sheet music (of course) and the striped paper from My Mind's Eye that I used on about a dozen projects (I just couldn't get enough of that paper!)...

Kandy's just reminded me of her- she's so girlie and I'm pretty sure she might actually have a magic wand. Really. I also loved that the paper had her birthday number on it (sorry, there wasn't a 29 in sight) and the book paper I used was the title page from 'Much Ado About Nothing'!

Unfortunately, when I made Cathy's banner way back in September, I never took a picture of it. Next time, I'll show you the banners that my girlfriends made for MY birthday!