Christmas Sweater Letters Garland

This is the sixth of  a series of twelve paper ornaments I’m making this year, one a month so that when December rolls around, I won’t be surprised to discover I’ve done nothing about my wish to have a fully paper crafted Christmas Tree.

I have some very nice neighbors who live behind us, and the way our yards and fences are, we can kind of see into each other’s houses, but we aren’t full on exposed. Sometimes when I’m in the back part of the kitchen where I craft, I can see them in their living room, and they are usually doing something very normal, like watching TV or fetching something from the kitchen or letting their dog out.

I wonder if they ever look across the way and see me scrunched over my craft desk (it faces the windows) sticking red letters on green paper and threading them with red and white twine, right there in the middle of June. I’m not sure that “crafting a series of paper Christmas ornaments” crosses their mind.

But sure enough, that was what I was doing. Because  I decided that June’s Christmas Ornament project was going to be letters that looked like Christmas Sweaters strung into a garland.

This is a pretty straightforward print and cut project. First I found an awesome blogger that was offering Christmas sweater backgrounds (plus a tutorial for making your own if you were in the mood). And then I set up my letters and positioned them over the background. I added a white offset to give me letters an outline, and then set up one more layer with a slightly smaller offset to give me my cutlines.

I brought the files into Silhouette Studio and turned on the Registration Marks, and then sent them to the printer.

I printed these on white sticker paper. That way I didn’t need to fiddle with glueing down these little letters. And that is a trick I will definitely be repeating.

I have all manner of glues, sticky tapes and even a little gadget that applies a sticker backing to things, but printing it on sticker paper is by far the easiest method I have stumbled across.

I placed the printed sticker paper on my cutting mat and loaded it into the Silhouette Cameo, and then sent the job to cut, selecting “Vinyl, Glossy” as my settings.

For the garland flag part, I drew a simple rectangle slightly larger than the letters, and then moved added an anchor point to the shape (In Illustrator, if you go to Object>Path>Add Anchor Points it will do the work for you) and then shifted the center point up a bit to get the two flag tails.

I brought that file into Silhouette Studio, and then duplicated it until I had more than enough for all my letters. I sent that to cut on some nice green medium weight cardstock.

After weeding (removing the extra material) both the sticker letters and the green flags, I placed each letter on a flag, trying to keep them kind of even and not too high on the flag. The top of the flag is where I sewed them to twine.

To sew them, I used a good sized needle to poke two holes on each flag. A dental floss threader makes threading thin red and white twine onto a needle easier, and then it’s just a simple over and under stitch (be careful to get them in order!) to finish the project.

In December, I’ll hang these in two rows on the front side of my Christmas tree.

Pin this so you can make this later!

Don’t forget to check out the other ornaments in this series:

No. 1 Paper Strip Ornament

No. 2 Glitter Snowflake Ornament

No. 3 Paper Christmas Tree Ornament

No. 4 3-D Paper Snowflake Ornament

No. 5 Paper Strip Ball Ornament

No. 7 Glitter Paper Star Ornament

No. 8 Hipster Paper Reindeer Ornament

No. 9 Peppermint Candy Ornament

No. 10 Brown Paper Packages Ornament

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