Sweet garland

Dear Shayne,

This was a project I spotted at the Craft blog that made me sit straight up and say, "I need to make that!" It's just so damned cuuute! (Bonus: I had all of the materials on hand.)

It's a candy garland made from fabric scraps!


Garland is difficult to photograph -- if you try to get the whole thing, it's a very long skinny photo. So here it is, coiled into a spiral:


The tutorial to make these is from CraftBits. She made hers using retro Christmas colors and perhaps I should have done the same, but I could not resist these candy colors. Cuuuute! (Oh, did I say that already? Hrm. Well, it bears repeating.)

Here's all the candy in a little candy dish:


I used 1 inch styrofoam balls and cut my fabric rectangles to be 5 x 6 inches. I then used the pinking shears to cut off .5 inches from either end of the rectangle. (So I guess I ended up using 5x5 squares.)

I pinked the other side of those half inch scraps and used them for my "ties." CraftBits did a cute job of tying little bows, but mine didn't look good like that, so I just glued my little pinked scraps around each end (if you click through to the large version of the candy in a bowl, you'll see what I mean.)

CraftBits suggested either gluing or sewing the ends of the candy together to create the garland. I was going to sew, but then... I had the glue gun out, so why not try that? It worked like a charm, so I just glued the pieces together. I like the haphazard way it ended up.

I'm going to hang this on the mantle for Christmas. Or maybe I'll make more and use it for garland on the tree? The possibilities are endless -- I think we need candy garland everywhere!

love,
kelly