Foam Sticker Banner

Sponsor-y post ahead. Consider yourself disclosed. Thanks, as always, for being a good sport (read on, and you’ll see that that, there, was a really fantastic and clever and highly original pun). 

I would have been happy to get a giant box of PomTree Kids supplies any day of the week. But when it showed up on a Friday night (the UPS truck here comes unbelievably late) in September, I was really extra happy.

See, Duke has a pretty good basketball team (oh, you’ve heard of it?), and getting tickets is. . . not easy.

For student tickets, they do something called “Campout” where you spend 36 hours camped out in a parking lot and some 25 times during that 36 hours, a giant buzzer sounds and you have to check in. Sometimes the check-ins are 10 minutes apart, sometimes hours go by without a check-in. Either way, you can only miss one check-in before you’re ineligible for tickets.

Manage to stick out campout, and your name is entered in a lottery for tickets. Manage to win the lottery, and you can fork out a couple hundred bucks for season tickets.

Obviously, Bart wanted to participate in Campout.

Obviously, I was not thrilled about spending a weekend single-parenting (although, to be fair, it was originally scheduled to be on my birthday, but then got bumped a week earlier. Thank goodness).

This giant box of paper, foam and felt stickers was a complete lifesaver (why is it that staying at home with my girls by myself is no big deal most of the week, but single parenting on a SATURDAY is possibly the least appealing thing I can imagine? Real single parents are superheroes).

Ella spent the entire morning carefully making bookmarks, cards, and decorated pieces of paper, and at the end, I didn’t have to try to get glue out of the carpet (I love no-glue projects. Some people like no-sew? I like no-glue). She was a little young for the play-set structures (ice cream truck! so ridiculously cute), but I’m saving them until she’s a bit older and can flex her problem-solving muscles a little better.

Of course, I’m never one to let a good craft project pass me by. And because I can’t stop thinking about Ani’s upcoming birthday (my baby!), I made a banner (it’d been too long). Ella made some birthday hats.

And yes, her birthday is still almost two months away. I just like to be prepared.

The banner is fantastic because the painter’s tape keeps everything in place but is super easy to remove, and the fact that you’re using stickers means you can hang up your banner anywhere you want. This was one of my more brilliant ideas ever.

Supplies needed:
– foam stickers
– painters tape
– sewing machine

Lay a long strip of painter’s tape on the floor or table top, sticky side up, and tape the ends down to keep it in place.

Place your foam stickers, right side down, on the tape (you only want about 1/4 of the sticker on the tape -the rest should be hanging off the bottom).

With your sewing machine, sew a loose stitch through the stickers (but not the tape). Try to stay slightly above the centers of the stickers, so they won’t spin on the thread when you remove the tape.

Trim the threads on the end, peel off the painting tape, then remove the backing from the stickers on the ends and hang your banner in place.

If you need to secure it more, you can just remove the backing of as many stickers as necessary and stick them in place too.

And then possibly make your baby pose. She probably will hate it. Or maybe that’s just the foam sticker Ella stuck in her hair she’s hating. I don’t ask questions.