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Since making my Halloween costume last October, I had really been jonsing for another sewing project. With Danny's birthday party on the horizon and no idea what to get him for a gift, I decided to make his present my January sewing project. In Final Fantasy 11, which he and I both play, there are different nations which a player can be allied to. When you complete all the missions for a nation, you recieve "rank 10", a big sum of money, and a flag to hang on the wall in your character's house. Here is the process of making a real life version of the flag you receive in the game.
  The first thing I did was to get a closeup view of the Windurst national logo, enlarged it to about 12-15 inches and printed it out. I traced that onto some fusible web. Then I applied the tracing to some green satin, and cut out the design of the tree. Likewise with some yellow/gold satin for the stars. The cut out pieces were ironed on to some white satin for the background, which gives a fairly permanent bond, but it doesn't look all that professional. So I went around the edges of the green and yellow pieces with a zig zag stitch. It took about, oh, forever, but it looked pretty good once it was done despite a couple of mistakes.
 The body of the banner was pretty straightforward. I made a pattern first from tracing paper, just to make sure the proportions looked right, but it was basically a 24 by 36 inch rectangle with the sides tapered toward the bottom. In the game, the flag looks like it has some gold embroidery down the length of it and around the square in the middle with the tree logo. I got really lucky finding some green and gold ribbon at Joann Fabrics that looked pretty similar to that, so I simply sewed that ribbon on instead of trying to mess with embroidery (which I would have failed miserably at I'm sure).
So with the ribbon and logo applique sewn to the green satin front banner piece, I just sewed on the back banner piece around the edges (of course leaving an opening to turn it right side out). Then, a row of topstiching about an inch from the top edge created a pocket for the dowel rod to sit in, and some gold and black cording attached to each end of the dowel made a hanger.
If I ever make another one, I may put some really stiff interfacing in the banner body. Overall, though, I was really pleased with how well it turned out and how much it actually looked like the game version. I think Danny liked it too, it's just too bad the green is really going to clash with the red walls in his office. I guess he should have allied with San d'Oria instead of Windurst so I could have made him a red flag.
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