St. Patty's Day Banner!

Posted by Ethne~

I really liked my LOVE banner I made for the mantle last year (see it here) and I thought that hanging a seasonal banner off of my mantle would be so festive!

Since Thrifty Nana’s birthday is the 18^th and Mel’s birthday is the 19^th, I just feel a special affinity for St. Patty’s Day.  Not to mention the St. Patty’s a few years ago we spent with Lori and Steve in little city, ND.  In case you’re wondering, YES, we did make it to all venues.

I’m not Irish at all.  My name is Irish.  Ethne means ‘blue blood’.  This means that I didn’t grow into my name.  If I did, Ethne would mean ‘rascal’.  Shaun’s Scottish, so that gets me kinda close.  And my Wolcott ancestors came over from England in 1630, but that hardly counts since there’ve been 382 years of dilution.  I suppose that means I’m a blue blood, but I’d like to think it means I’m a red-blooded American.

My sister-cousin Nicole's son Drake has red curls - I
conned her into allowing me to put a bow in his hair since
KD and Easy Mac's hair is stick straight.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, St. Patty’s Day banner.  I just cut out some large and small shamrocks out of a variety of green felt sheets.  I encircled the edges of the large shamrocks in glitter green puffy paint.

And as with the Love banner, I crocheted a chain-stitch out of white yarn.  It’s stronger than one strand of string/yarn, and it’s more flexible than ribbon.  Here’s what you do:

Make an open-looped knot (I think it’s called a slip knot but I wasn’t in boy scouts and didn’t have a brother) leaving about 2 inches of the yarn tail. 

Grab the string

Stick the crochet hook through the knot hole, with the hook grab the string of yarn that’s still attached to the yarn skein and pull the yarn string through the loop.  Repeat until you get your chain stitch to the length that you’d like.  I wanted mine to span my mantle and droop down a little in a curve (about 36-48”).

And pull the string through the loop

With that new loop, grab the string again and repeat.

I handstitched the large shamrocks onto the string at even intervals and then filled in the gaps with the small shamrocks.  I glued those on.

Isn't it cute?  Please ignore my crooked lampshade.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, all!  We’re making reuben sandwiches, so I’ll tell you about those next week.