Sewn Paper Garland.

I am hosting a baby shower for my sister on Sunday. At some point I decided against any sort of theme (although there are some extremely cute nautical themed baby shower photos out there!) and decided to just go with shades of blue & green that are colors I tend to gravitate towards. It may be helpful to know that she is having a boy so blues & greens definitely work. At the same time, my sister isn't really into the whole normal baby blue color. So, I was definitely trying to stay away from that.

After the success of my 4th of July garlands, I figured why not do the same. The main problem with that tended to be the fact that felt tends to come in fairly generic colors, at least from what I've seen. So, the next choice was paper.

I just went to Michael's and picked out 5 12x12s and a circle punch to eliminate the whole cutting thing, especially since circles are just so much fun. I wish I could tell you what brand of punch that is but I tore it open and threw out the packaging right away.

After I had a good amount punched out in all colors, I tested it out on the sewing machine. I was a little worried that the gaps between would make my machine angry or that the paper wouldn't work very well, but it worked fantastically.

 It took me awhile to get my groove down, but I was able to get a timing down really well. I had all of the colored circles laid out in piles by color in front of me, so I could just grab the next one. I had about 2-3 stitches between each circle which gave a decent gap between each one. It was actually really easy to just feed each one right in under the food and then it would catch on the mechanism that helps pull material through.

In terms of settings, I just used what my machine was set on. It was the same I used for the felt. I would test it out and adjust your stitch length and tightness as you go to see what works best for your machine and the paper.

Please don't mind all the felt dust on there... I should clean that off.

As of right now, I have two fairly long strands and enough to do a third (which I'm going to whip together quick in a few minutes). I did punch out the entirety of all 5 12x12 sheets. I'm not 100% sure on how I'm decorating. They do look really good with my office wall color though...

I will definitely update after the party with pics of the decor all up and with how much length I got out of all of it.

I still have tons to do and I'm actually getting nervous! I need to clean, decorate, bake, wrap gifts... And not only am I hosting on Sunday, I'm attending another on Saturday. Busy, busy, busy!