The Bride's Guide Blog

Our next installment of our Week of White series comes from crafter Laurie Cinotto, of La La Laurie. For years Laurie was a florist first, and crafter on the side. She started experimenting with paper flowers using her traditional floral techniques to assemble them into permanent corsages, boutonnieres, and bouquets, thus making her two worlds merge and creating her perfect medium.

Shortly thereafter, the "La La Laurie" etsy shop opened, and Laurie starting doing craft fairs, taking custom orders, and transitioning from florist to full-time crafter. You may have first seen Laurie’s creations on her blog, or on one of her guest posts on The Bride’s Cafe, or on the pages of our Summer 2009 issue.

When writing her DIYs, it's always Laurie’s goal to create projects that can be easily made with materials that are readily available to brides wherever they may live. “I love taking common, everyday things and making them into something special and unexpected,” Laurie says. “I like the projects to be versatile, so they can be customized to work a variety of styles, themes, or color palettes." Laurie's Ethereal Garland DIY below certainly meets this criteria. Happy crafting!

These garlands are so easy and hardly cost a thing to make. Gather your bridesmaids and crafty friends and have them help you create enough to fill your reception space. For the cost of a few boxes of waxed paper and several yards of rick-rack, you can completely transform a room or tent into something really amazing.

Materials (to make one six-yard long garland):

• An 18"-wide roll of waxed paper
• Assorted text-weight paper in shades of white and ivory
• 6 yards of rick-rack
• Assorted craft punches (bird, flowers, leaves, etc.)
• A lacy border punch
• A small hole punch (large enough for your rick-rack to pass through)
• A pair of scissors
• An iron and ironing board
• An old towel to protect your ironing board
• A cotton dish towel

Optional materials:

• Rubber stamps
• Ink pad (designed for stamping on glossy surfaces)
• Other items to press between waxed paper such as: feathers, pressed and dried flowers, bits of lace or ribbon

Instructions:

Before you begin, cover your ironing board with an old towel and turn your iron on to the "cotton" setting.

1. Cut a sheet of waxed paper approximately 20” in length. Fold in half vertically, and crease the fold.

2. Punch a handful of birds, flowers, or leaves from your text-weight paper and scatter them between the two layers of waxed paper. (See image A.)

3. Place the waxed paper and punched shapes on your ironing board and cover with your cotton dish towel.

4. Press your layers. Keeping the iron moving, press firmly while the heat fuses the layers together. Every thirty seconds or so, peek under the towel to check the progress. The waxed paper becomes more transparent as it fuses. Once the layers have fused completely, set the waxed paper aside to cool. (See image B.)

5. After the paper has cooled, cut out two 5” x 7” rectangles.

6. Use your border punch to create a decorative edge on the bottom of the rectangle. (See image C.)

7. In the top corners, punch a hole approximately ¼” wide.

8. Repeat and steps 1-7 and create 36 rectangular flags for your garland. Mix it up, and try pressing other shapes or items between the waxed paper. You can use feathers, thread, scraps of paper doilies, stickers, seals, lace, and ribbon bits. You can also stamp images or patterns on the paper using rubber stamps and ink. Allow time for the ink to dry.

9.  Once you've created all 36 flags, string them on your rick-rack, spacing them about ½” apart. (See images D and E.)

10. Hang your garland above the cake table, swag them across the front of your head table, or make multiple garlands to hang from the ceiling and fill a room or tent.

Want more white ideas? Check out our white color palette story in the latest issue of the magazine!

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Posted by Shira Savada on January 21, 2010 in Color Palettes