I have made this garland or bunting several times now but my favorite version so far is the one hanging in my little tot’s room. It is made out of all the wonderful cards welcoming him to the world. I am a sentimental person but I also try to not just store a bunch of stuff, so after snapping a photo of the cards for his book, I used three different paper punches, two different circles (1.5 inches and 2 inches) and a hexagon (because I love hexagons). In no way would I recommend cutting these by hand – I only did it for one or two cards (see fuzzy lamb photo). I then simply proceeded to punch out shapes using the paper cards, also adding in some shapes made out of some of the gift bags etc. You can do this with scrapbook paper, kraft paper, printed images, photos and mix them together or whatever you want.

Fussy cutting, fuzzy lambs…

Helping make the Halloween garland!

If you want to reduce the amount of white paper (aka the backside) you can make them by ( two circles together at a time). No wrong way to do this.

From here I turn on my sewing machine, use whatever needle is in there, or change it to a old one saved just for this and start sewing them in a random order, right down the middle.

Sew! Sew! Sew! When done you can cut it to the length you need.

Here is the finished garland. You can even see some of the handwritten notes. For his upcoming birthdays etc, i plan to punch out more shapes and keep adding on to this until the day I stop. I realize that soon enough the wee one will be standing up, eating, pulling the garland, So I can let him play and/or move them above a window, more like a swag. 🙂

Baby shower version: I used some stamps that went with the theme. 

For our Halloween party this year I used construction paper and scrapbook paper to make a ton of garland for the backdrop in the Photo Booth (and had about 75 feet extra left. oops.) For this version I used a a spooky round bat stamp on some circles.

The finished halloween garland backdrop. I added on some black paper bat sillouttes (the theme was Gone Batty after all).