St. Patrick's Day Door Makeover

With a last name like "Collins" and two Irish Water Spaniels running around, we enjoy St. Patrick's Day!  February and March are not my favorite months of the year because everything outside is so drab here in Utah, so I like to brighten up my front door and my home with lots of decorations.  A few easy projects can really brighten things up!

Banner-

This is a simple project whether you can sew or not.  If you can, you can stitch the flags into a piece of bias tape.  If you can't, glue can be your best friend!

To make a pattern, I folded a piece of paper in half the long way and cut a straight line to make a triangle.  It ended up being almost the full 8.5" wide at the top and 11"long.

I traced this little foam shamrock with a pencil.

Then I filled in the traced area with a decent coat of white acrylic paint.  Maybe I should have used a darker green.  I already had the fabric (which is a cotton canvas) so I was making do.

Stitch the flags into the bias tape.  I started at the middle and went one way and then started in the middle again and went the other way.  That way my flags are evenly spaced and my glitchy sewing machine is showing the top stitches- not the garbled bottom!

Pillow-

The directions on how to make a pillow envelope are HERE.  For this I used burlap as a nod to a potato sack and then a piece of the same canvas that I used for the banner.  I traced another shamrock that I had to cut the shamrock.

Door Shamrock-

This is one of those projects that became a disaster.  I am not happy with my results, but it will have to do until I buy more glitter!  I made a freehand pattern for the shamrock and used a jig saw to cut it out of some scrap wood that I still had in the garage.  (Read- "That Parker hadn't gotten to yet. . ." 

I based painted it and then I was all set to use "Glitter Blast" paint on the front.  It did not work at all.  And I even followed the directions.  I am a very unhappy customer right now.  :(  So, then I sprayed the whole thing with clear polyurethane (I was outside, by the way.  Do NOT do this in your house!  Or by your car. . .) and sprinkled three different colors of glitter on it.  I ran out of glitter, so it is a little anemic, but I an always add more.  And who doesn't want more glitter?