Rustic Garland

While my daughter REALLY wants to start decorating our Christmas tree with ornaments, I am trying to wait until Daddy can be here. In my eyes, putting the ornaments on the tree is a special family tradition. I have photos from the past 2 years of my husband lifting L up to put the star on top of the tree and I love to see how she's grown and changed.

I've been trying to come up with little projects to keep her mind off of putting ornaments on the tree so I came up with a garland we could make since we don't have any for our tree! We have a lot of country and cowboy ornaments so it needed to be something natural and rustic so we went to Hobby Lobby and picked up a couple bags of wooden beads and a spool of sisal.

All we did was string a bunch of beads onto about 30 feet of sisal and tied a knot on either side of the bead in completely random spaces. Some beads are a few inches apart, some are only half an inch apart. The 30 feet shrunk down to about 15 feet with all the knots and clipping off the end of the sisal would it would unravel too much from putting the beads on. One thing that helps with that is taping the end of the sisal like the end of a shoelace, you get a small hard end that will slide through the bead.

To compliment the bead garland I also cut 2 inch strips of burlap and pulled the same thread on each end of the strip and gathered it until I liked it. Then I tied a knot on each end of the thread that had been pulled so the ruffle would stay.

I alternated the burlap and the beads down the tree and I'm loving the result. The beads are delicate, yet natural and the burlap is rustic, yet has a soft look with the gathering.

Thank you for stopping by on this cold Indiana Friday!