Thursday, December 1, 2011

Tree Decor: DIY Newlywed Christmas Garland

Last year we purchased our first tree together. We didn't have a lot of ornaments since we never had our own tree so I came up with an idea to craft a wedding photo garland. I knew it would be time consuming, but I was really excited to include our wedding photos in our holiday decor.
So I purchased red and white cardstock and bakers’ twine. I then resized and printed off a ton of pictures of our families from the wedding.
Then, I used some craft punches to cut out scalloped circles for the “ornaments” and attached the punched out photos, and finally, I strung them together with the bakers’ twine to create a garland.
I loved looking at our tree decorated with family faces.
Especially photos of our family on the happiest day of our life (so far).
We then needed a tree toper. I wanted to be traditional and get a star, but couldn’t find any we liked. So we tied two Starfish left over from the wedding with the bakers’ twine to create our “star.”

Our tree was filled with love and wedding memories. So, here we are a year later. It seems funny to have a newlywed tree, since we aren't newlyweds anymore. Instead, I'm thinking of exchanging some of the photos with every day pictures because I love it too much to just not use it. Plus we don't have a lot of ornaments still. So it looks like the garland will be around for a bit while we work on building our collection. Jim's birthday gift to me this year definitely helped.

How'd you start building up your ornament collection?

6 comments:

  1. Your newlywed garland is a great way to include those memories on your tree.

    I haven't thought about our relatively small collection, but will probably have to help that next Christmas. In the past, we had a small tree so it was easy to get a couple of boxes of ornaments from Garden Ridge and fill up the tree.

    I've accumulated some ornaments over the years so that will help, but I'm sure our tree in a house will be much larger than the Charlie Brown apartment one. I think I may turn some of our fridge magnets from our trips into ornaments.

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  2. this garland is so creative and fun! great work :)

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  3. What an incredibly cute idea! We don't have much of a collection either. I've been thinking of using holiday cards as they arrive in the mail.

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  4. @ Lauren, fridge magnets sound perfect for you. I love how you collect those on all your trips.

    @our wired lives, cards sound like a really great idea! I have so many pretty cards this year, maybe I should turn some into ornaments? :)

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  5. The tree garland and starfish topper are just adorable! Love!

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