CRAFTY DAY 18 - VINTAGE PAPER GARLAND

This beautiful garland is soooo simple to put together and looks fantastic hanging across the top of my little girls bedroom door.  It would be lovely also if the flowers where cut out of scrapbooking paper, wrapping paper or even childrens old story books. I am fortunate enough to own a Sizzix die cutter so that part of the job was alot easier. I made a gingerbread man one for christmas.

MATERIALS

Old book, paper etc
Die cutter - or you can cut them out by hand
two jump rings
Sewing machine








Cut out your preferred shapes.  Thread your machine with a contrasting or complimentary thread colour.  Leave yourself a good length of tail on your machine before starting.  start sewing across the top of your cutout.  Try to avoid sewing across any open centres in your cutouts as the machine will tend to gather it.  Whilst feeding your flowers into the machine keep a tension on the thread out the back with your other hand.  You will feel the bobbin feed out a length of thread (things will loosen up) this is when you should feed in your next flower.  This allows for a nice spacing between flowers.  When finished leave a good length of tail thread.  Tie a jump ring to each end of the garland and trim of excess tail threads.  And you are done.

This was the first garland I made and you can see where sewing across the spaces of the cutouts in some places has caused gathering.  I had also not worked out the spacing issue.  Will be definatly making this one again.