Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Snowflake Garland Tutorial

Today I will give you my step by step process to make two strings of snowflake garland.  I used mine to decorate my mantle, but I think they would also look cute decorating a window or in a child's room.


 Supply List:
  • paper
  • scissors or Cricut
  • Mod Podge & paint brush (optional)
  • glitter (optional)
  • heat gun (optional)
  • string
  • needle
 The first step is to cut out snowflakes in a variety of sizes.  You could simply use a scissor to cut out the snowflakes, but I used my Cricut because it was quick and easy.  I have the Accent Essentials Cricut cartridge that has a cute snowflake pattern, and if you are familiar with Cricut's you know that you can cut shapes in many different sizes.  I decided to cut snowflakes in 4 sizes:  1", 2", 3" and 4"; I cut several of each size.  I used white cardstock, but you could also use colored paper.

Here's my Cricut hard at work:


Once the Cricut was done cutting out my flakes I simply remove the mat and use the Cricut spatula to carefully remove the flakes from the mat.  If you look closely you can see the various sizes of flakes all cut and ready to be removed:


Once the flakes were all removed from the cutting mat I had lots of cute snowflakes:


Next I decided to add some glitter to the snowflakes.  I used Mod Podge which I spread on the individual flakes with a sponge-type brush, then sprinkled glitter on them.


At this point I remembered why I don't like working with glitter!  What a mess!  Luckily I had started with the large flakes and once those 4 were done I put the glitter away.  The flakes with the glitter do sparkle, but you really only notice it if you are looking at it closely.  I would recommend that you skip this step unless you just love glitter!

I decided to use my heat gun to set the glitter so I didn't end up with glitter everywhere:


The last step was to string the garland.  I used one strand of red DMC floss, but you could also use baker's twine, fishing line or any string.

I sewed through one of the larger areas of paper on each flake so that they wouldn't rip.  I went through the top and botton to keep them hanging straight.  Once I had each flake strung I tied the floss with a loop at the end so that I could hand it on my hook.

My favorite thing about these two strings of garland is that they gently spin, especially when there's heat coming from the fireplace.

This was a fun, easy project - give it a try!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I love those snowflakes! They are so pretty!