I have been wanting a silk banner (standard) for years and years, but I’ve been putting it off. I finally decided that it was time, so I could have it for Pennsic. We’ve had a pile of silk for ages (from Dharma Trading, I would guess), so that part was already taken care of. I’d worked out a design sometime last year, and tweaked it a bit to come up with my final plan:
The motto was the translation I found on the interwebs for “Just Do It” (Google translates it back as “only make”, which is close enough).
I originally thought I was going to lay the design out directly on the silk, but reason intervened and I did the layout on paper instead. Three sheets of poster board and two sheets of charcoal sketch paper gave me just enough room to work out the design across a couple of folding tables:
I taped the paper down and went about my layout with compass, straightedge, pencil, and Sharpie. There was a fair amount of trial and error, so I’m glad I made the wise decision to save the silk for later. I printed out full scale samples of the text so I could get an idea of the size I needed. Instead of trying to trace the letters directly (hard to do through poster board), I rigged up a double pencil to draw the letters out freehand:
Once the design was finalized, I taped down a pre-washed length of the silk and transferred the design in pencil:
The layout was probably the part that took the longest out of this whole enterprise. It certainly took a lot longer than I thought it would. I’m glad I took the extra time, though, as I think the final product was just about what I wanted.