Fork me on Github Banner Not Removing...

[AnyaRamaswamy]

I am trying to remove the 'fork me on Github' banner on the merlot theme. But all I have is my readme file and the _config.yml file (which is where I used the theme: jekyll-theme-merlot code). I then made a new file in my repository called layout/default.html where i copied the raw html of merlot and removed the code for the banner (when I tried making the file /layout/default.html, I got an error). But this also didn't remove the banner. Could you give some simple steps I can follow to remove that banner?