Craft project: holiday garland

I saw a really cute holiday garland banner on etsy and wanted it. But, I'm cheap, impatient and picky: I didn't want to spend almost $30 with shipping; I wanted it now- if I had to wait a week for the order to process, then ship, it would be pretty close to Christmas; and my holiday color scheme is pink and green- not red and green. All the garlands on etsy had red in them. I wanted my garland to hang on the French doors right behind my tree, which has a pink and silver color scheme.



(One of the outtakes from our holiday card photo shoot. Note the pink and white Lilly Pulitzer tree skirt- I bought it on sale in June or July, I think! I was SO excited.)

Apparently these factors created a perfect storm...clearly I wasn't thinking rationally. I blame holiday excitement-this was the first time I put the tree up with the new skirt, and I was really excited. So I decided to make my own garland.

Umm. Arts and crafts have never been my strong point. I taught myself how to read by the time I was 3- my mom didn't even know I could read, until one day when she was pushing me in my stroller and I started reading off street signs. But I got a "check minus" on cutting and pasting in kindergarten.

This seemed like a pretty easy project. Right? Wrong. For starters, I was trying to save money. I probably spent over $20 on supplies, so not much of a savings there. Not to mention all the time I spent running around getting supplies. Oh, and the actual labor itself. Ugh.

At any rate, to make a long story short: this didn't come out quite how I wanted, but it's decent. I used card stock, grosgrain ribbon and a green paint marker. After going to 5 stores and not finding stencils in the font I wanted, I used a combination of stencils and freehand.

It was very much a trial and error thing- I didn't plan to cut out pink snowflakes, but that just kind of happened. I had actually picked up some snowflake cutouts, planning to mount the letters on them. Instead I used a snowflake cutout as my stencil to make the pink ones, then stenciled the letters directly on to the snowflakes.



Here's the work in progress. (The blue pile is the stencil sheets. Other tools used were scissors and hole punch.)

This project was a total comedy of errors- everything went wrong. Even the hole punch was wrong- the only one I could find at the craft store, and it cuts mini holes. Wtf. I had planned to use glitter glue to edge the letters...didn't work out so well.

I finally decided to cut my losses and work with what I did have. It's not how I pictured it would turn out, but it works:



(Sorry for the weird lighting in this pic- my couch is cream and tan, not weird neon!)



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