Sunday, May 1, 2011

Personalized Pennant: Pottery Barn Knock Off

I last posted about my knock off of PB's Ruler Growth Chart.  My "Pottery Barn taste on a Target budget" struck again as I came across these Personalizable Pennants on PBK's website.



 My son LOVES baseball...so he has a baseball-themed bedroom.  I'm trying to lean more towards "vintage Americana baseball" feel as far as decorating it goes.  I thought that these pennants would perfectly fill up a blank wall that I was lacking inspiration for.  Don't you LOVE how Pottery Barn styles their catalog rooms?!  Be still my heart.



However I don't have a money tree in my backyard, so I wasn't willing to fork over the $49 plus shipping that PBK wanted for them!  I also read the reviews of the pennants and they were less than stellar - several reviewers even said that they could have made the pennant themselves.

So I dug in my stash and did just that!

I started out designing a pennant in Photoshop Elements.  The PBK website listed the dimensions of the pennant as 30" wide x 12" high, so I created a triangle that met those measurements.

I loved the font that was used on the pennant and found a free one that's pretty similar.  It's called Athletic and is a free download!

From there, I added Grayson's name in PSE and re-sized the letters so they "faded" down the pennant.  The letters aren't an exact copy because mine are simply shrunk down to fit, where PBK's were actually shrunk and slanted to mirror the edge of the pennant.  But, this took me less than 10 minutes to create - so I was happy with my "look alike". :)


I printed this out in a tiled format (in reverse - which helped the applique process immensely!), which left me taping several sheets of paper together to create the large size of the pennant.

Once I had a paper "copy", I dug through my stash of felt and found both royal blue and white felt.  So this project was FREE for me!

Now it's time to applique! I grabbed my trusty Heat-N-Bond, traced Grayson's name, and appliqued my white letters to the blue felt.  According to the reviews, PBK's pennant is created by gluing the letters on.  I wanted to make it more durable, and look more like an "authentic" pennant, so I took the time to sew my letters on, in addition to the Heat-N-Bond. (Need applique instructions?  Here's a great tutorial!)

A close-up of the letters...it shows the difference that the stitching makes:




Here's my final product!  I think it's pretty close to the original!


I will post a picture of the pennant in Grayson's room in the next few days. I have another knock-off project to post about first!  It was one of the finishing touches on Grayson's room and was a knock off thanks to Restoration Hardware. :)

3 comments:

  1. What a cute idea! Thanks for posting this tutorial. I am going to try and make this for a friend's upcoming baby shower :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for posting.

    ReplyDelete

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