Personalized Back to School Pennant Flags with Cricut

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Cricut. All opinions are 100% mine.

This has got to be the strangest back to school year EVER! We were planning to send Don to Kindergarten, but for 1 million reasons, we’re red shirting him and he’ll be doing another year of preschool. Although things don’t look how I thought they would (and I know I’m not the only one), I still wanted to take cute back to school pictures! So I made some first day of school pennant flags.

first day of school pennant flags

SUPPLIES

12″x18″ pieces of felt– I got these on sale for $1.25 each sheet at Joann Fabric
Craft Dowel 5/16 by 36″ long $1
Rotary Cutting Kit
Free Pattern in Cricut Design Space
Cricut Explore Air 2
Standard Grip Machine Mat
Weeding Tool
Easy Press
Iron On in White and Kelly

Total Cost of Supplies- $29.25 (felt and iron on and dowel)

You can buy a set of six of these pennants for $100, so I felt pretty happy about being able to make them for much less!

step 1

Start by cutting the felt into a pennant flag. I made mine 8″ wide by 18″ long. These are really easy to make without a template once you know the right size. Note, you can get two pennants of this size out of one piece of 12″x18″ felt.

I ended up cutting enough pennants to make one for the first day of preschool, kindergarten, and grades 1-6. I thought it’d be fun to have the same style for each year! And it’s just easier to make them all at once instead of trying to remember what I did in a few years.

step 2

Next, I used my Cricut Explore Air 2 to cut the iron on vinyl with the free template I created on Cricut’s Design Space. Remember, with iron on to always turn the mat on (so that it prints backwards and irons on correctly). Put the material on the mat shiny side down.

I wanted to note the fonts I used. There’s so many options, sometimes it can be hard to narrow them down. Hopefully this will help. For the number, I used Base Camp. For the “st” or “nd” next to the number, I used Quirky Script. And for “grade” I used Close to my Heart.

After the material is printed, weed out the extra vinyl.

step 3

And now, cut a binding and little ties for the end of the pennant. This detail really will finish it off. Usually, making a craft look great means paying attention to the details.

step 4

Finally it’s time to iron the words onto the felt pennants. For this, I used my Easy Press and looked up the setting on Cricut.com. For felt, it instructed me to set it to 280 degrees F and to hold it on for 30 seconds. That worked perfectly.

To attach the binding on, I sewed on the extra piece of felt and tails. I left the bottom open for the dowel. Below, you can see the pennant flag on the dowel.

I made 8 flags, but figured the dowel could be reused each year. That way, I can more easily store the pennants.