Printable Halloween Banner: One Letter Per Page
Fourteen letters, fourteen pages, one string. That's the banner.
We built this one to be forgiving. Each page holds a single pennant with a printed cut guide around it, so there's no measuring and no eyeballing whether your Ls match. Cut on the line and every flag comes out the same size.
Download: HAPPY HALLOWEEN banner — free PDF, Letter + A4 — no signup, no tricks.
What you need
- The banner PDF, printed on 14 sheets
- Cardstock if you have it, plain paper if you don't
- Scissors or a craft knife and mat
- A hole punch — a standard 6mm office punch is perfect
- 2.5–3m of twine, ribbon, or baker's string
Colour printing is nice but not required. On plain white paper the letters read fine, and there's a case for the stark black-on-white look above a fireplace.
The steps
- Print all fourteen pages first. Do the whole run before you cut anything. Printers pick this exact moment to run out of black, and finding out after you've cut six pennants is a small tragedy.
- Check the scale. Print one page and measure the pennant against the guide. If your printer is set to "fit to page" it will shrink everything by 3–4%, which is invisible on one flag and obvious across fourteen. Set it to 100% or "actual size".
- Cut on the guide lines. Stack two sheets at most. The pennant is a simple tapered shape, so the long angled cuts go quickly — do those with a single confident scissor stroke rather than lots of small snips. Small snips leave a wavy edge.
- Punch two holes in each pennant. Top corners, about 1.5cm in from each side and 1.5cm down. Punch them all in one sitting so the spacing stays consistent — a stack of pennants and a rhythm beats doing it letter by letter as you string.
- Thread the string. Go in through the front of the left hole and out through the front of the right. That over-under pattern is what stops the flags spinning to face the wall. Thread every letter before you adjust anything.
- Space it out. Slide the pennants so there's roughly a finger-width between each, then leave a bigger gap between HAPPY and HALLOWEEN. That single gap is what makes it read as two words instead of one long alphabet.
- Hang from the ends. Small nails, removable hooks, or a loop of tape at each end. Let it swag — a banner pulled tight looks like a warning sign.
Real time and difficulty
About 40 minutes start to finish, and most of that is cutting. Printing is 5 minutes, punching is 5, stringing and fussing is 10. Easy enough for a kid to do the punching and threading while an adult handles the scissors.
The honest gotcha: twine slips. If your pennants keep sliding into a clump at one end, put a tiny dot of tacky glue in each hole once the spacing is right, or tape the string to the back of each flag. A strip of washi tape on the back does it neatly and peels off in November.
Download: HAPPY HALLOWEEN banner — free PDF, Letter + A4 — no signup, no tricks.
One variation
Cut the pennants down to just HALLOWEEN — nine letters — and use the five spare pages as backing. Glue each letter onto a slightly larger rectangle of orange or black paper so every flag gets a border. Shorter banner, more finished look, and it fits a doorway better than a mantel.
You can also skip the string entirely and tape the pennants directly to a window in a shallow arc. Works well on glass where twine has nothing to hang from.
Before you pack up
Store the banner strung, coiled loosely into a large envelope. Unthreading it means re-spacing next year, and re-spacing is the fiddly part.
Hang the bat garland below it on a second string and the mantel is finished in one evening. If glue comes into it anywhere — backing, hole reinforcement, sticking flags to a window frame — our craft glue guide will save you a peeling letter.
Print it, cut it, hang it. Fourteen letters is nothing.
