I love a colorful Christmas tree with all my favorite things about Christmas. Here is how your Christmas tree can make a statment…literally, by adding a little bit of typographic garland to your decor.
Materials
- Grab your favorite lettering stencils. If you don’t have any you can easily format some with you favorite font and print it out. If you print it out, I suggest using a font with no “fill” and printing it directly to the cardstock you will cut. I used some wooden letters I had as stencils. If you liked mine you can download the stencil PDF for Merry and Bright.
- Cardstock paper the color or pattern of your choice
- scissors
- Sewing Machine OR needle and thread.
- Ornament hooks
Step 1: Trace your stencil onto the paper
Step 2: Cut your letters out.
Step 3: Make sure your letters are about the same size and get them in word order. (not pictured)
Step 4: I chose to sew my garland. You can sew paper if it’s thick enough. Cardstock and scrapbook paper will work for sewing. You can use a needle and thread if you don’t sew or don’t have a machine. You want to use a thin needle and with thread for sewing. No matter if you machine or hand sew, you want to leave some excess on the end so you can easily hang it from your tree.
Step 5: Sew your letters together leaving a couple inches thread in the spaces between the letters. To make “thread space” between the letters you don’t need to stop your machine… just keep sewing. The machine will make a thread chain between the letters very nicely.
Step 6: At the end of your garland make sure you leave some excess so you can easily drape the garland from the tree.
Step 7: Tie your string excess to the end of an ornament hook.
Step 8: Drape your garland on the tree.
If you notice I changed two things. First, the lettering popped off the tree a little better in white so I changed my lettering to white. Don’t be afraid to change your project if it doesn’t look the way you want it to, and this one was an easy change.
The garland draped better if I cut the words. All I had to do is take it back to the sewing machine and add some extra string on the ampersand. Using the bristles of the tree can help you hide the string of the garland.
This is a really simple project with really unique results! It doesn’t have to be limited to a christmas tree. Typographic garland added to your greenery garland, or over a mantle would look great.
