School Club Banner

The School Club Roundup, an amateur radio event where schools and other amateurs all over North America attempt to contact each other by radio, is coming up next week.  One of the participating clubs will be the amateur radio club at Monrovia Middle School in Monrovia, AL.  I made a banner for the table where we'll have all the radios to help the students at the school know what we are up to.

The first task was to decide what to put on the banner.  Obviously, the club's call sign, KD4MMS, needed to be prominent.  Then, a bit of explanation.  The school mascot is the hawks, so Hawks Amateur Radio fit in the space and explained at least a little bit.  The school colors are yellow and black, which made choosing colors for the banner easy.  I used nylon canvas, a fairly heavy material typically used for flags.

The first task was to cut out all the letters.  There's a lot of ways to do this, but I chose to use my Cricut maker and a standard font for all the cutting.  The letters sure look a lot better than if I'd tried to design or cut them.

The letters in the call sign had to be in the design individually because they are nearly at the limits of the 12"x12" cutting sheet.  The smaller letters could be done several at a time. 

I laid out all the letters and tacked them down with a spray adhesive.  They wasn't quite good enough to keep them all attached during the sewing phase, but it was a good start.

Each of the letters was individually sewn to the banner.  I used a 4mm zigzag stitch with a 2 mm stitch length.  All of the sewing was hand guided.

The finished applique of the letters looks good.

Next, I applied a back sashing to finish the banner and deal with all the raw edges. 

The last step was to put grommets in each of the corners.

Let's hope the kids get good atmospheric conditions for next week and that a bunch of them see the banner and decide to come see and hear for themselves what's going on!

Come back next week for another adventure in sewing!