Raining Grace: Merry Christmas Banner!

Well! It is good to be back! My laptop was stuck at work and my photos were stuck in my iPad so now I ma ready to show you what I made right after Thanksgiving. I don't know about you, but crafting has been at the bottom of my to do list with all the shopping, choir performances, parties and let's not forget craziness at work! Oh well, all part of the excitement I suppose.
For Thanksgiving I made a "Blessings" banner that hung in my dining room and my husband just loved it. I was so excited he liked it because he normally has no opinion about such things. So when he asked me to make one for Christmas I jumped on it.
This turned out to be a not so good lesson in color theory and how not to use too much pattern, etc.
So I began by cutting a banner out of the red then a large star from a pretty pattern paper that contained all the colors I wanted to include. (See at this point, I thought I was doing real well choosing paper...)

If you look closely you will see a scalloped circle but from a great yellow/gold paper with music on it backed with a green shadow. I LOVED this music paper and it was to be a sort of "feature" of this banner. Well, then I cut the letters, using Cindy Loo out of the same red paper. Turns out...too much red. It all kind of blended together and when I first hung it up you couldn't read the letters AT ALL!!! I was so bummed!!!!

So my daughter suggested outlining all the letters with red stickles and I thought YES!!! That will save them. So SHE painstakingly outlined each one with a perfect thin bead of Christmas red stickles. She is awesome and only 14.

I thought that was the solution but you still could not read the letters. There just was not enough contrast so I cut out the large white snowflakes from When It's Cold Outside and put them behind the letters and it helped immensely as you can see below. I then tied each banner together with jute. I know it looks good from close up and I do really like them but ...

As you can see below, still a problem from a distance. SO...then lesson here would be to use a higher contrasting color for the letters, not the same paper as the background. I will probably re-do this while I am off for Christmas break and I think I will make the letters a golden yellow or white, or maybe a green, hhhmmm, I think I am going to have to do some experimenting!

I hope you enjoyed it anyway and were maybe inspired to create your own Christmas banner. Let me know if you do, I could use some pointers :)
I can't leave without mentioning that Kristal at Getting Cricky will be having a Snow Much Fun blog hop coming up on December 16th with great projects from our wonderful design team. I hope you will join us.