Us In Otto: Valentine Paper Garland

Crafting between the Mantels

I've been working on ideas for my February mantel. Hitting thrift stores, after Christmas sales (there's a lot of pink ornaments and bows out there people, in the Christmas clearance stuff) and looking at everyone's blogs. What can I say? I'm a craftlifter. But that means I like what you all are doing, right?

This morning I was poking around some Esty shops, just ~~wasting time~~ getting inspired and I see a lot of paper garlands for sale and I thought, "Hey! I can do that!" I mean, they are so cute and seeing as I'm a scrapbooker as well I have ~~some~~ a lot of scrapbook paper. So I start digging through my stash looking for Valentine-y papers and this is what I found:

So I picked out about 4 different patterned papers and some plain white, pink and red and started cutting out hearts with my trusty Cricut. I also noticed that one of my Cricut cartridges had the word "LOVE" that I could cut out, so I did that as well. After cutting out lots of hearts and lots of LOVE I lined all my cutouts up to get ready to sew. I did glue some flowers to the plain hearts, just because I love paper flowers.

If you don't have a Cricut, no biggie, just cut the hearts out by hand. Use the grade school technique, fold a piece of paper in half and draw (with pencil) a half heart outline at the fold and cut out, then when you open it up you will have a full heart (awwwww). Then just cut out lots and lots and LOTS more!

Then I just sewed it all together in one long strip:

HELPFUL HINT #1:

As you are sewing your garland, make sure to carefully stretch it out periodically instead of letting it pile up behind the sewing machine or else it will get all tangled. This is the voice of experience speaking. Trust me on that one.

Also, you can play around with the spacing between your paper pieces, I actually wished I left more string spacing between the paper pieces. So play with that a little as you are sewing it.

HELPFUL HINT #2:

On some of the garlands I saw on Etsy, they used heart doilies as well as paper hearts. It looked adorable! Why doesn't mine have heart doilies you ask?

Well:

#1. I didn't have any.

#2. I didn't want to go out today to get any.

#3. I wanted to do this project TODAY.

But I wanted to tell you about the heart doilies because, really, they would be cute if you're going to make one for yourself. I just used the word LOVE in place of heart doilies. I also thought it would be really cute to put "X's" and "O's" in there as well, but the word LOVE won out on mine. See! There are SO many possibilities!

Oh! I suppose I should show the final product!

Isn't it just the sweetest? (Ha ha that's a pun). Don't you just LOVE it? (Another pun). I HEART it! (Okay, okay, enough with the lame puns).

So I snuck over to my January Mantel and tried it out just to get a preview of how it would look.

I even liked how it looked upside down and wonky. Yeah, I'm going to have to make sure when I use it on my February mantel that the hearts and LOVE are pretty much upside up and not backward.

HELPFUL HINT #3 - VERY IMPORTANT!

Did I mention how easily paper garland tangles? If not, let me mention it again, paper garland tangles easily! While I was playing around with it on the mantel it tangled a lot. This was ~~majorly~~ a tad frustrating. So I knew I would have to come up with a storage solution for it so it wouldn't be all tangled when I went to pull it out again.

Wait for it.

Because it's really high tech.

Almost there.

Here it is:

Yup, I just tore the cardboard back off of a spiral notebook. The spiral hole part works great for when you are wrapping the garland around it, you can space out the garland that way. After I wrapped it all around I just stuck it in a ziplock bag where it is patiently waiting with my other stuff I'm going to use on my February mantel.

Total cost. ZERO!! I had everything! So the only thing it cost me was a little time. Woo hoo!

With lots of LOVE and paper hearts :-)