House Elves and Banners

We are making progress on Zoe’s room, but it’s not a Gryffindor dorm room quite yet. I’m procrastinating on the largest project, which is sanding down Zoe’s bed and staining it a dark wood color only because I know it’s a huge project. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on something a bit more manageable: banners.

Zoe wants a banner for each of the Hogwarts Houses so I figured I could save money by making them instead of buying them. Why spend $20 each to buy four banners when you could spend a hundred dollars on all kinds of supplies and other stuff you might only use once to have something home-made? Anyway.

To make house banners, we would need some type of material, wooden sticks to hang them, and house crests. Material: I knew I had some yards of felt somewhere and whatever I didn’t have, I could pick up at a local store. Check. Wooden sticks: I have foot-long bamboo skewers for shish-kabobs. Check.  House crests: I happened to have some iron-on transfer paper from years ago, so I could print the house crests on the paper and iron them onto the material. Check.

After inspecting our inventory, we had red felt (for Gryffindor) and yellow felt (for Hufflepuff). Now we just needed blue (for Ravenclaw) and green (for Slytherin). So off to Wal-Mart I went, dragging Zoe with me (who, by the way, hates to shop, but she was willing to tolerate it because it was her project). We didn’t find the right color of felt, but we did find all four colors in 100% cotton, so we got a yard of each so at least the banners would be made out of the same material. Zoe also now thinks it would be fun to work at Wal-Mart and measure out the fabric. I told her she can have whatever jobs she wants.

I drew a few variations of banner shapes and let Zoe chose which one she wanted. Then I penciled a very rudimentary banner on the yellow material, dug out my trusty pizza cutter and my not-so-trusty sewing machine, and winged it. I even ironed the material – if that’s not pulling out all the stops, I don’t know what is. I wanted to make the banners look nice (or at least as nice as I was capable of making them), so I sewed seams around the material edges so they wouldn’t unravel and pockets for the wooden sticks (making sure the banners were only 12 inches wide because that’s how long our kebab skewers were). Evidently, I’m not that great at rounding corners, but hopefully the vibrant colors will overshadow the stitchery.

Printing out the house crests was easy enough, thanks to the internet, Microsoft Word, and the cropping feature. I printed logos almost as large as the full sheets of paper for each of the four houses. The next step was to cut out the designs and iron them on. I cut out the first crest, paying attention to all the little ins-and-outs of the design … and spent 10 minutes trying to get the stupid paper backing off of the transfer, with no luck. Then I re-read the instructions, which state “Separate the imaged transfer from its release paper. This is easier if you slightly tear the paper in one place and slowly peel it off the transfer.” So, I grabbed the next paper and cut out most of the transfer, leaving a few inches of margin so I could rip the paper before it reached the design. After five minutes, I gave up and figured I’d wait for Nik to get home. When Nik finally got home, he tried for a few minutes and, when I mentioned the transfers were about ten years old, he said they were probably too old and I would need to get new ones. So much for trying to be thrifty and using stuff on hand.

Thus, my banners are still lacking logos, but they look semi-fancy with their little shish-kebab skewers and they will go nicely with the other Harry Potter paraphernalia. Zoe has a plush “Dobby the House Elf” doll, a sorting hat, and a small red and gold felt pillow (hence my stash of extra felt, which I didn’t end up using) that she made herself when I taught her how to hand sew a few years ago. Since I happen to have quite a bit of leftover cotton material from the banners, I will sew a little sock for Dobby to be free (because, for those of you who don’t know, a house elf can only be freed when he is presented with clothes). Now that I’ve officially freed the house elf, you can expect that all home-made projects are made by muggles and therefore subject to the imperfections of non-magic methods.