Autumn Scrap Garland How To

I have a tutorial for you today!

Sort of. I mean, it's really easy to pull off and it looks pretty cool, so I thought I'd share how I made some autumn scrap garlands for decorating things.

Here's what you need:


-Scrap fabric
-Thick Yarn
-Scissors
-Patience
-A large workspace

That's it, folks. I used a long thick cut of yarn as my base for the garland because that's what I had. The one you're seeing in these photos is the one that I made for my cubicle at work, which measures a total of 4 yards (12 feet), but you can make them at any length you need. The ones on my windows that you'll see in the final photos are about 4 feet long.

For fabric, I chose whatever I had on hand that looks autumn-ish. Yellow, orange, brown, black, red, little bit of green... Those kinds of colors. You can choose whatever colors you want or have for whatever season or holiday you like. If you don't have a ton of scrap fabric like I do, you can get remnants or fabric quarters for pretty cheap at most fabric and craft stores. And if you have trouble matching colors, check out jelly rolls. At my local Jo-Anns' a jelly roll costs about $10 and has a variety of matching/complimentary 2.5" strips of fabric. I've used them for quilts, but they'd be great for a project like this.




Cut a bunch of strips of fabric about 5" long and 1" or 1.5" wide. Mine range from 4" to 5.5". You don't have to cut them evenly at all. Some of my pieces are weird shapes because my fabric scraps did not all have square edges. There's some triangles and trapezoids and half-circles in there.

I started with the fabric I had the least amount of so that I knew I could space it out evenly. I started tying scraps to the yarn about a foot apart, leaving a knotted loop about 6" away from the ends of yarn (so I can use the loops for hanging the garland). The scraps are tied using a basic square knot. Once I had my first groups of scraps tied on, I started tying pieces halfway between each piece to slowly fill in the garland.




And just keep tying scraps to your yarn until you like how full the garland is. You can leave them spaced a little or scrunch them all up close so that you don't see the yarn at all.

Once you like how it looks, hang it up however you like! I mentioned before that I tied some loops about 6" from the ends. For my window garlands, I used these loops to hook the garland up on some Command hooks on my walls. For my cubicle, I used T-pins to pin the yarn to my cubicle wall, which were easily hidden by the scraps.

Here's what the finished product looks like on my bedroom windows:




Well, that's not quite my windows look like right now because of Halloween, but these look just as cool over some of that creepy Halloween fabric. And everyone who's stumble across me putting these up has said that they're really cool, so if you want something a little different to decorate for this autumn, give this a try.



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