A Church Banner for Reformation 500

One of my church pastors asked me to make the church a banner for an area wide celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation toward the end of October.  Another pastor asked my friend Anita Born, who is an artist, to make the banner.  The funny thing is that I am teaching Anita to make baby quilts and wall quilts and we get together frequently, so on Tuesday, we discovered that we had both been asked to make the banner.  So we did what any reasonable friends would do, decided to do it together.  We had both drawn up some concepts for the banner.  I had just decided that mine was too formal, and would probably take too long, for this particular kind of celebration and I should probably start over and maybe have some trumpets on the banner when I found out she had also been asked to do the banner.  So here is what I designed at first:

My original design for the reformation banner…too formal and too complex.

So when Anita came over on Tuesday for our usual Tuesday afternoons together, she brought several drawings and one of them had trumpets!  Here is her original drawing:

Anita’s original drawing

So we worked over the design a bit.  She came back yesterday and we finalized our design concept and I redrew it a bit in my drawing software and we decided how we were going to make this. Below is the design we came up with and I just got the fabric. Anita is going to paint us some trumpet appliques and do most of the handwork, and I am going to embroider the words in my Bernina 830 LE (Gibbs). and we are going to do the applique cutting and placing together.  We decided, after talking with our pastors, that we should put the “Reformation 500, 1517 – 2017”  text on a removable text box applique so we can change the text and use it in other ways for the church…something celebratory.

Here is the final design concept. The green ferns will be made from multiple greens and placed in small sections on the banner, so may look different when finished.

We are having a lot of fun doing this together and it will speed up the project a lot.  I’m so glad we found out about both being asked before we got two banners made!  I’ll post more on this project as we go.  I need to get back to work now.

Sew happy everyone!  Have a wonderful weekend and week.  Find a friend to do some creative things together.