Spool and Tulle Garland

On Kelli Nina Perkins blog I saw the most gorgeous spool "beads" garland. She used bright pretty colors, vintage spools and sewed on little tiny treasures. It was love at first sight. So much so, that I decided to make a similar one that same day. I highly recommend you read her awesome post as mine is a little less fabulous, more homespun and made by three boys and a husband. Which for me makes it the absolutely most special thing in the whole world, but if you're looking for perfect and artsy her's is the one.

First decorate your plain wood spools (20/2.99 at Hobby Lobby) by inking up a text stamp and then pushing each end of the spool into the text. Next roll the edges across your ink pad. 

It really dresses up the plain spools.

Cover the spool with tacky glue. Wrap half with one type of fiber. Glue down end. Repeat with second type of fiber.

Next we added wire. Kelli sewed her beads on and it looks SO GORGEOUS but I wanted to make this as boy and husband friendly as possible so we used wire. What worked best was to make a loop on the end of a six inch piece and hook it under the fiber. I'm showing you this on a relatively flat ribbon so you can see how it hooks on.

Then we threaded completely random beads on the wire and dropped them down against the spool as we wrapped it around. To finish the ends we repeated the hook and loop step and then squeezed the wire tightly in our fists to map sure it was on good and tight.

I emptied out all my Gauche Alchemy color kits and let them have at it

This was how my cute family looked for about an hour.

When you're done you should have this:

I let ours dry overnight at this point just to make sure the glue was good and set.

Next you'll need a six foot piece of tulle and a skewer.

Tie a knot in the tulle about six inches in from the end, slide on a spool, using the skewer to push the material through and then knot off the other side. We tried not knotting both sides of the spool and they slid around a lot when wrapping around the tree.

And then hang them from your windows, wrap them around a tree - doowhatchalike!

If you're looking for my version of Tim Holtz 12 tags of Christmas CLICK HERE

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