Halloween Garland

Last night I had a few friends over to carve pumpkins, so I decided to make some Halloween garland for decoration. Here's a quick tutorial for 2 different garlands. You could easily make this garland for any holiday and just swap out the colors and images.

Happy Halloween!

-Allison

First I gathered the paper I wanted to use, the Hambly Brocade in orange and black was perfect for Halloween. I also wanted to add some vintage paper, so I took some pages with a gothic looking font out of an old book. (It was from a estate sale and in German, so I wasn't planning on reading it anytime soon.) I cut out a variety of birds on the papers using my silhouette. You could also easily use die-cuts instead.
The vintage paper from the book was really thin, so I used a Xyron 250 create-a-sticker to adhere it to stronger paper. This was my first time using this Xyron machine. It's perfect how it covers the entire cutout, even the thin delicate parts with adhesive.
Next I used my sewing machine and connected the birds using a straight stitch to make the garland! I just kept sewing one bird after the other.

After I finished the bird garland, I decided to make a quick coordinating Halloween Banner. I grabbed my pinking shears and cut out little flags in a variety of the same papers. I added some black sticker letters to the banner to spell out Happy Halloween, then glued 2 papers together for each banner to add more dimension. I wanted the banner to be stronger at the top, so I used a zig-zag stitch over bakers twine which worked great. This banner went together really fast!