Harvest Mantel Banner

Every fall I go through a bit of an internal struggle. After back-to-school, what goes up…Halloween decor? Fall? For years, Halloween has won out and creepy fun decor has overtaken the house. This year, I decided to take a bit of a different direction and embrace simple fall decor featuring a fun harvest mantel banner.

Between the change in holiday decor and the fact that I will have only one official trick-or-treater out making the rounds this year I am close to near breakdown…

I know. First world problems, right?

Time to move past the seasonal whining and onto the project at hand. I’d love to show you how I made this fun fall banner.

I started the project with some burlap Online Fabric Store sent my way a while ago. I have to be honest. I didn’t measure or worry about a perfect cut, I just whipped out my scissors and used my favorite burlap trick to cut nice even squares.

To cut burlap without all the mess, snip about 1/4-1/2″ the way in. Pull one burlap strand all the way out. It creates a nice straight line you can cut along and it eliminates some of the dust.

I wanted to add a bit of a nicer finish and so I added some gold eyelets to the top of my banner pieces with my Crop-a-Dile.

Once the burlap was ready to go, it was time to move on to my letters. I cut the harvest letters out with my Cricut Explore in just a few seconds.

One of the things I like most about my new machine is that I can upload any font and use it to create a cut file. Since I was using rough burlap, I wanted to dress the letters up a bit so I used a more ornate font than I normally would and then edged the letters with gold glitter glue.

The final step in really making this banner look great was adding a bunch of paper leaves in white, gold and kraft cardstock from Jen Hadfield’s new line Home+Made.

I also cut these paper leaves out with my Cricut. To add dimension, I curled some of the leaves and folded others down the middle.

I liked the look of the paper leaves so much I tucked them around the rest of the decor on my mantel.

It’s no Halloween scare, but I am really happy with the simple harvest banner and I know it will be perfect for when the family comes over on Thanksgiving!