Busy, Busy, Busy

From the looks of the date on our last post, you can see we have been busy, busy, busy getting ready for weddings, shows, and other summer time events. I love that school has started again because it gives me a few hours in the day to work on things.

 I love to look at magazines for ideas and I save them to leaf through the pages again and again. This magazine is from March 2012, and there was an article about a farm in Illinois that belongs to Polly Hood. I loved how she decorated and as part of the article she showed us how to make a paper garland. I marked the page thinking it would be fun to make one some day, then added the magazine to my pile to get back to later. 

Well, here we are, later, much later, and I was leafing through it again and reminded of the paper garland I wanted to make. No time like the present.

 You only need some twine, old book pages and some scissors. You can really use any book pages but I have boxes of older ones for various crafts so I dug out a couple that had the pages the patina I wanted.

You have to remove the pages from the binding, which is easy enough, and goes quickly if you are watching a show you are interested in. :)

Next you fold the pages in half (not a hard fold) just enough to be able to cut about a 1 inch slit in the middle of the page. You can cut several pages at one time.

Next, you gently crinkle each page, kind of gently gobble it, but not tightly, and thread it onto your twine, that you have cut to the length of the garland you want plus about an extra foot to make a loop on each end. Loop the first end, string the pages onto the twine and gently guide them to the looped end. Keep going until your twine is filled with pages.

 For a 6 foot garland I used about 500 pages. When you get to the end with about 6 inches of twine left, make the second loop. You will use the loops to secure your garland to wherever you are going to hang it. I wanted mine for the fireplace mantle. We currently live in a rental so we are limited in what we can do. I want to make a bigger mantle, and paint the bricks, but can't so decided to dress it up with this garland, and I love it.

So easy and such fabulous results. If you don't want to make one yourself, I will have a couple for sale at Junk Barn Girls Sale in Stanfield the end of September, and at Shabulous in Cove Oct. 5th. I love getting my craft on!