Hangin' Around

Here are some easy and festive garland ideas to help brighten up your holidays:

After each Christmas, I try and make it a point to get some kind of Christmas decor on super duper sale.

I realize that if I go right away, the selection will be greater but the crowds and price reduction might not be the greatest. 

If I wait, I'm likely to get something upwards of 90% off and not have to deal with any sort of crowd. The selection, however, is pretty much guaranteed to be pretty well picked over at this point.

Unless I have something specific that I've been eyeballing, I usually wait and see if anything jumps out in January.

A couple of years ago I picked up these cute felt Christmas tree ornaments.  If memory serves me right, I believe they came in sets of four, originally $1/each set.  I think I got them for $0.30/each in January?

They came with those gold strings on top, to be able to hang them from a tree.  I cut those off and used strings of jute tied in their place.  Of course you could leave the gold ones on as well.

Then I strung a long piece of jute through them, spaced them out evenly, and hot glued the tops of the individual strings to the longer piece of jute.

The colors of these felt trees tie in nicely into the kids' playroom/basement.

This simple ornament garland was made with the following:

scrapbook paper

double stick tape

fine glitter

ornament hooks

tiny hole punch

larger circular paper punch

thread

1.  I just simply cut varying-length strips of different green scrapbook paper and thread them through the sewing machine.

If you don't have a sewing machine, you can hang these one a string of lights, store bought evergreen garland, twigs, etc...

2.  I used the larger circular paper punch to get the circular-shaped papers.

If you don't have a punch, you can turn a glass upside down, trace around it and cut out circles that way.

3.  Then I took strips of double stick tape and folded them at the top of the circles (ornaments), leaving a small part of them to stick to the paper, but the majority sticking above it.

4.  I dipped them to cover them in glitter.

If you don't have glitter or double stick tape, you can just use regular tape or washi tape.

5.  I then use the small hole punch to make tiny holes in the center of the glittered tape.

If you don't have a small punch, you can just poke the ornament through with a little force.

6.  Lastly, I just put real ornament hooks into the tiny holes and hung them from the paper evergreen.

I have a fair amount of white felt left over from my daughter's communion banner, so I thought it'd be neat to put a little twist on the red and green holly garland, and make it all white.

To give it that snowy look.

The good thing is, this can be strung and work with pretty much any style holiday set-up.  

Whether it be whimsical, with reds, turquoises, and pinks, or more traditional with red and green, the all-white color should tie in pretty nicely.

I just used a washi tape roll as a an outline template to help me cut circles and just eyeballed the holly leaf cutting before feeding the pieces through the sewing machine.

I have a snowflake garland that I've started, but haven't finished.  If I get my act in gear, I'll do an update.

Thanks for stopping by!