I love that Christmas song, “Deck the Halls” it’s so upbeat and cheery! So the best way to me to kick off the 12 days of Handmade Holidays is to do just that! I wanted to deck the halls with items I already had, or would be easy to obtain! In fact, you’ll notice that for this years crafts, I’m really trying to stick with a, “use what you have” mentality. I did purchase some stuff here and there but I’ll give suggestions on things you might already have in your craft supplies! I am an amazon associate and I will earn a few cents on qualifying purchases made from links I provide.
This Christmas Garland is SO versatile! I mostly concentrated on making Pom poms to string together and I let the Garland themselves inspire me to add or not add to them. I also worked on keeping like materials together. For example two of my three garlands are soft with the yarn Pom poms so adding some fabric or fleece/felt kept the Garland soft. For the bead Garland I made snowflakes from popsicles, so it kept it in a wooden/hard surface theme!
To start I chose a place in my house where I wanted to display these garlands! I hung a $3 tension rod I got at big lots using command strips with hooks! Then I used a blanket I already had and draped it over the rod. This helped give a neutral background to my wall that had pictures without me taking them down!
A lot of my Christmas decorations that I already have are in Buffalo plaid so for my first Garland I went with that same color scheme! I used a cherry red yarn, a burgundy yarn and a black yarn and alternated it like you’d see in Buffalo check. I used a pom pom maker to make the pom poms. It was so easy to make them this way. I bought mine on amazon last year but you can also find them in your local craft store.
Then I had some Buffalo check fabric leftover from my camper restoration project so I cut out little flags! I made them into the shape you see in the picture so I could flap them over the yarn and sew them on!
I also tied all the poms on so I could slide them around to adjust their position! I used the longer tails that were created when I tied the poms in the middle. Then I trimmed I also made sure to sew the flags on so they could slide around. This was really helpful when I did hang my garland and could center the flags.
For my second garland I wanted something super classic with red and green. I was actually all over the place with ideas on this one and managed to simplify it. I think that made it a better garland! I had this idea to make it red, green and golden and add dangles of popsicle, maybe make some cute Christmas ornaments out of perler beads – my mind was racing with ideas! I decided to calm down and take some ideas and share all of them with you! I’ll share them at the end though. So as you can see in the picture below I made red, green and golden yellow pom poms.
I actually stringed them up and had them on my fireplace for a few weeks and every time I looked at it, I didn’t feel Christmas cheer. So I took out the yellow pom poms. This left some gaps and I had thought about making perler bead red stockings but liked how my flags looked in my buffalo plaid garland so I decided to make stockings out of felt.
I used a metal tapestry needle to poke and then thread the yarn through the top of the stocking. I love this WAY more than the gold. The red stockings help balance the red and green and add a little charm that the garland needed!
For my last garland I used wooden beads that I found at my local craft store and used white, purple and blue pony beads. I used two pony beads in between the wood beads and alternated the larger beads and the smaller beads. Since this garland was made with wooden beads I wanted to finally make some popsicle snowflakes to hang from it! I actually wanted the plain wooden popsicles, but my dollar tree only had painted popsicles, so I used blue and I actually love it! I think if I were to make another garland like this I could make it longer and alternate blue popsicles with plain popsicles. I used a tapestry needle with yarn on it to string the beads together.
To make the popsicle snowflakes you can just glue them where they meet with some Elmers glue. Easy Peasy! Once the glue hardens I glued some loops of yarn to the snowflakes with my hot glue gun.
I love how wintery this garland is! I feel like I could leave it up past Christmas and it wouldn’t feel out of place. To hang these garlands I simply made loops and hung them on the command hooks. For the beaded garland, I didn’t make it long enough to do that so I just draped it on the bottom garland.
I have LOVED decking the halls with these new garlands! So to add more ideas for y’all’s garlands here we go. Other than making some more pom pom garlands, you could make bead garlands, you could braid yarn and tie colorful ribbons or strips of fabric to it. You can hang ornaments from your garland. These could be ornaments you pick up, already have, or make! For ones you make the possibilities are endless but my favorites involve classics like popsicle sticks and perler beads. Felt and fleece are great for cutting out shapes for ornaments/garland embellishments because it doesn’t fray and can hold it’s shape well. I’d also recommend looking at your decorations you already have and work with those color palates! I wouldn’t have thought of making a buffalo plaid one if I hadn’t thought to match what I already have going on.
I can’t wait to share the rest of the 12 days of handmade holidays with you guys this year! You can check out other Handmade Holiday crafts and recipes here. If you’ve made a garland I’d love to see it! Be sure to tag us on socials! Also if you loved this post you can buy me a coffee! It helps support the website and keep it ad free!
xoxo
-Robin
