Planning your baby’s first birthday party, and looking for ideas on how to decorate her high chair? Can’t find a banner to match your party’s theme and need to make one?

With a DIY high chair banner, you’ll be able to customize it any way you want, and you may even save yourself some money. But, how do you go about making these “Pinterest Worthy” high chair banners…especially when you’re not crafty at all?

In this post, I’ll cover the exact steps I used to make my son’s high chair banner so that you can recreate your very own. Plus, I’ll give you two more examples of first birthday high chair banners I’ve made.  

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How to Make a DIY High Chair Banner for Your Baby’s First Birthday

Here’s the steps I used to make my son’s high chair banner, and how you can create your very own:

STEP 1: PLAN YOUR THEME

The first step to creating your own high chair banner is to decide on a theme for your baby’s first birthday. We did a cat theme for my daughter’s birthday and a polar bear theme for my son’s. Here are some examples of other themes you could choose from:

• Winter ONEderland
• Mickey or Minnie Mouse
• Donut First Birthday
• Woodland Creatures
• Wild ONE (Where the Wild Things Are)
• Generic Pink or Blue First Birthday

STEP 2: GATHER YOUR MATERIALS

Once you’ve decided on a theme, start thinking about what colors, characters, and banner shapes you’ll want to use. From there, you can start to gather your materials. To create a DIY high chair banner, you will need:

• String
• Tape and/or sticky tack (packaging tape works best)
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Marker
• Strong glue (I’ve had good luck using a hot glue gun)
• Felt, foam, and/or ribbons of your choice
• Access to a printer

STEP 3: MEASURE YOUR STRING

Once you’ve got all your materials handy, you can start creating. Take your string and measure how you’ll want it to be around your baby’s high chair. Make it a little longer, so you’ll have more room to work with it. You can always cut it shorter at the end.

STEP 4: CUT OUT YOUR BANNER SHAPES

Next, take your felt and start cutting out your banner shapes. You could do simple pennants (basically a triangle), a center dovetail, or a gonfalon. Here’s a few more flag styles.

To cut out my pennants, I simply folded my felt in half hot-dog style and used my ruler to mark a diagonal line from the top to bottom. My felt was a little longer  so I had to drag my ruler down as I was tracing. After I had my line traced, I simply cut it out. It’s just like cutting out a folded heart like you did in grade school. Easy peasy.

My pennants didn’t turn out perfect, but they looked great after everything was finished.

STEP 5: GOOGLE AND PRINT SILHOUETTES

After you’ve got your banner/flag shapes all cut out, you’ll need to decide what you want to put on them. Will you have characters on the, the number one spelled out, or just a number 1 in the center. I went with a number 1 in the middle pennant and a polar bear on each of the outside pennants for my son’s birthday.

Once you’ve got an idea of what you want to design your baby’s high chair banner with, start googling to see if there are any silhouettes you can print out.  I found that printing your image as a “3×5” or “4×6” works best, but play around with the different sizes to see what will work best for your banner.

 

STEP 6: TRACE AND CUT YOUR SILHOUETTES

After you’ve got your silhouettes, start cutting them out, so you can use them as a tracing tool. Trace them along your felt or foam paper, and then cut them out.

To make an image face the opposite way, simply flip it over and trace it facing the other way on the same side of the paper. Now you can have two of the same image facing towards each other on your high chair banner. (I hope that makes sense!)

STEP 7: GLUE YOUR SILHOUETTES

Now that you’ve got all your silhouettes on the material you want, facing the way you want them, you can start gluing them on your flag shapes.

STEP 8: GLUE/TIE YOUR SHAPES AND RIBBON TO YOUR STRING

After you’ve got all your numbers, characters, and any other designs glued on your pennants, you can start attaching them to your string. I simply used a hot glue gun and rolled the top of the pennants over the string to attach them. You could also put hole punches on the sides of each pennant and thread the string through, but I didn’t want to string to be shown.

STEP 9: ATTACH TO YOUR BABY’S HIGH CHAIR TRAY

Once you’ve got all your shapes attached to your string, you can then attach your banner to your baby’s high chair tray (with your dog’s help of course 😉 ).

I used packaging tape to secure the string at the back of the tray and also added a few rolled up pieces on the back of the pennants to attach them in the front. You could also use sticky tack in replace of tape.

Make any tweaks/adjustments needed.

Don’t mind the messy house…this is real #momlife.

STEP 10: CELEBRATE!!!

Now that you’ve got your finished product, it’s time to celebrate at your baby’s first birthday party! Show off your DIY high chair banner and honor your baby’s first year of life. Time truly does fly, doesn’t it?!

Other DIY High Chair Banners

Here are a few other high chair banners that I’ve made:

This was the banner I made for my baby girl’s first birthday. We had a pretty awesome kitty cat party for her. For this banner, I used a few different pastel colors of ribbon along with a kitty cat ribbon I found at our local Walmart.

I simply tied a knot in the top of the ribbon to attach it to the string and then cut it at the length I wanted. I created a dovetail shaped flag in the center by folding the felt hot-dog style and then cutting a small diagonal line near the bottom from the center of the folded crease to the outside bottom. I used sparkly foam paper for the “1” and white felt for the cats.

 

This was my niece’s high chair banner that I helped my sister make. Her birthday party was “Beauty and the Beast” themed. We used 3 different yellow/gold ribbons attached to the string by knots, and we cut the stems off of some artificial roses and hot glued them on to the front of the string and ribbons. I think it turned out beautifully.

What About You? 

What kind of banner are you planning to make for your baby’s birthday? Did this post help give you some ideas? Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to share this post with all your new mom friends.