Junk Mail Garland--Perfect Decor for a Jammie Party!

While browsing The Crafty Crow for ideas, I found the best tutorial for Junk Mail Garland!

I usually have a giant pile of junk mail on my side table...I have to force myself to go through it to sort out the 'recycle', 'shred', and 'important stuff' into piles.

Recently my niece stopped by and wanted to paint.....hmmmm....I am an art teacher, but rarely do I have the supplies on hand for kids to get artsy crafty at my house, but luckily I had just read this amazing idea from Scrumdilly!

Quickly, I squirted some paint onto paper plates, snipped my junk mail into not-so-even sheets and let my niece and neighbor's daughter go to town painting the junk mail with pretty paint colors.

The paint dried quickly so I was able to bring out my paper punches and let them start punching fun shapes out of the garland.

While we did everything in less than an hour, we kept it fairly simple, but with a bit more preparation, you could use crazy scissors on the bottom edges or you could just cut it in waves like the tutorial shows....this garland would even be beautiful with some glitter! I didn't bother with that.

Later that night, once all the paint was dry, I used a long bit of ribbon to stitch the paper together to make garland.
Why would I need to create all this garland? Well I was planning a 'jammie party' with all the kids in my family for Saturday night and we needed decorations of course!

After creating one long piece to go across my fireplace, I took the pieces that were left over and punched holes along the top edge. When kids started arriving at the jammie party, I let them 'stitch' ribbon through the holes (over-under technique...even my 4-year old niece could do it!) and we hung the mini-garland pieces around the doorways at my house.

Supplies Needed:
Junk mail
paint
brushes
punches
ribbon
This was a really easy and fun craft project to do with kids...the garland was perfect for 'Our Rockin' Jammie Party'!!

It was super fun! We made chocolate covered strawberries, played games like Pictionary and charades, made popcorn and pizza and watched UP, tie-dyed shirts, this morning we ate waffles, played more games and went on a fun walk around the neighborhood.

1 comment:

j. wilson said...

how super duper fun! i love all the happy punches all over. them stars are awesome! thank you for enjoying and sharing with me! happy may!