DIY Christmas Ribbon Garland
As soon as I finished my fall ribbon garland, I knew I was going to have to make another one for Christmas. I caught a fantastic Black Friday Sale on ribbon at JoAnn’s, and I was set! I *love* the colors in this one. A lot of our Christmas decor is “anything goes,” and this certainly does. 🙂
This truly is an easy project to put together. You don’t need any supplies other than ribbon, scissors, and a ruler. One type of ribbon should be the base ribbon for your garland. For this one, I had a spool of thin red velvet ribbon. You could also use string or twine if you’d prefer. For the decorative ribbons, I used all 1.5”, since it worked so well last time. You could use whatever size you like, though, or even mix and match!
To make my garland, I started by cutting my base ribbon to 8 feet long. This gave me more than enough to work with.
Next I started cutting my decorative ribbon into 12-inch pieces. Even though I had five more designs this time (12 instead of 7), it went faster because I used a shortcut. Instead of cutting each ribbon individually, I cut 6 at a time. I wasn’t sure how this would work, but it worked perfectly! The trick was keeping them straight as I stacked them. I cut 8 pieces of each ribbon. Had I done the math sooner, I would have realized that was way more than I needed. But I didn’t. Thankfully, it worked out just fine.
Once I had all of the pieces cut, I sorted them into piles and then arranged the piles in the order I wanted to put the ribbon onto the garland. That way I could balance the different colors. I’m not sure it would have looked much different had I added the ribbons randomly, but this made me happy.
I started tying the ribbons onto the base ribbon about 12” from one edge.
To tie each ribbon, first I folded it in half. I put the folded end under the base ribbon and opened up the loop at that end. I pulled both of the ribbon tails over the base ribbon and through the loop, and then pulled them tight. I held the base ribbon as taut as possible as I was doing this.
I wanted a very full garland, so I pushed my ribbon knots together. I knew from last time to check periodically to make sure the base ribbon wasn’t getting bunched up. If it was, I just pulled it tight and pushed the ribbons together to fill in the gaps.
I kept going until I ran out of ribbon, and as I said earlier, it ended up being longer than I’d anticipated. Oops. I used 70 ribbons last time and 96 this time. It doesn’t actually seem as long as it should be, but if it had been a problem, I could easily have just taken some of the ribbons off.
The last step was to make a loop at each end of the garland for hanging it, and then I hung it up! I had to hang it higher this time because it drooped a little more, but it looks so pretty!
As I said after I made my fall garland, one great thing about this garland is that it looks great from any angle. There’s no bad side to it. That’s what makes it perfect for hanging between the pendant lights over my kitchen island.
If you make your own garland, I’d love to see it! You can share it with me on Facebook or Instagram.
Happy crafting!
