Quote

Black Lives Matter

Friday 19 December 2014

Gold 'paper-chain' style garland using slats from an old blind

When I moved into my new-to-me  little house, the previous people had left behind the blind in the bathroom. I realised pretty quickly that it was broken and unfixable, so I cut the strings to get more light into the bathroom. I've since removed the top bar as well and as its a frosted upstairs window facing onto the side of my neighbours garage its not an urgent need to replace.

Anyhow I noticed once I had taken it down, that what I had thought was a brown blind was actually just a very dirty sparkly gold blind. So at this point I fished it back out of the waste paper bin and chucked it in a corner waiting for future inspiration to strike.
As we got nearer to Christmas we had a Christmas tree festival at church decorated by local groups, and one had a paper chain decoration. 'Ah ha' I thought, 'I could cut the blind up into pieces, staple them together and make a gold garland.....
So I washed and dried the slats, cut each one into 5 pieces about the same length discarding the sections round the little holes for the cord, and made a chain using 2 staples in each piece to hold them together. Its pretty springy stuff so glue or sticky tape is no good.
In use it is nicer if you turn the stapled sections to the back so they don't show too much. In my case each blind slat makes 5 loops and even with two garlands the lengths in the picture I have lots still to make up. All that stapling gets a bit hard on the wrist though and I needed to wrap a few presents so I paused for a bit.
I used a few sections of the blind as tags in the pots of Hyacinth bulbs to indicate the recipients (no pictures of that but you can probably imagine how that works.).

3 comments:

Jenni said...

what a wonderfully creative idea. They look fabulous. Lovely mirror you have them hung on too. they look very classy but festive.

marysews said...

This is a really cute idea! Thanks for sharing.

Ann said...

A great idea and I bet they would look perfect on a Christmas tree. The lights would make the chains sparkle.