Christmas Bead and Fabric Garland Tutorial

Christmas is a busy time and I love to decorate everything that stand still. Christmas garlands are a great way to cover a lot of ground quickly.

An added benefit is they’re easy to store because they don’t up much room. I made these Rustic Christmas Garlands because I loved the look of the scrappy fabric and twine garlands that were all over the place a few years ago.

But I needed lots of garlands and I wasn’t that interested in typing a billion knots. I bought the wooden bead garlands for this project from Michael’s.

The hardest part of this project is transferring the beads from the original garland to another piece of twine. The key is to make a very small knot, then you can slide the beads from the old string to another. 

Adding the fabric knots will make the garland quite a bit longer than the original one. If you’re ok with a shorter garland you can skip the transferring process and just take the beads off. 

You can use any woven fabric torn into strips. Clip a small notch at the selvage and rip it across the width of the fabric.

Then cut the strips in half, then in half and in half once more. They should be about 6 inches long depending on the width of the fabric.

I used unbleached muslin from Joann’s torn into strips.

Rustic Christmas Garland Supplies

?  Twine

?  Beaded Garland (needs to be actually beads on a string, 1 piece pressed plastic won’t work here. I got mine at Michael’s for less than $3 with coupon/sales)

?  Strips of fabric

?  Scissors

How to Make the Garland

Start by re-stringing your garland. It’s actually much easier than it sounds, promise. Carefully cut the end of the garland and slide off 5 or so beads, set them aside for now, you need some empty string to tie the string and twine together.

Slide 3 beads over to the knot, try to get both pieces of twine inside the beads, it looks cleaner. Then start tying your fabric knots every 3 beads.

Now just keep swimming, er, tying until you get to the end and tie off with another loop.

 

Pretty nice huh? And much faster than tying all those knots. I’ve put them on trees, across bookshelves and on the hutch in the dining room. 

 

I needed 2 used-to-be-9-foot-not-quite-sure-how-long-they-are-now garlands for this tree and hung another across the hutch.

Don’t forget to pin this to your Christmas board! Find more holiday projects on my Christmas page or start here: