Christmas is known as the most wonderful time of the year, and decorating your home for the holidays is one of the best parts of it, but store-bought decorations can be costly.
On top of that, all too often store-bought decorations are plastic, covered in glitter which adds microplastics to the environment, easy to break and a small amount for a hefty price.
By making these DIY decorations out of trash in your home is not only more sustainable and environmentally friendly, but it’s also much more cost-effective and a great way to keep your children busy during the December holidays.
Paper bead garlandsPaper beads were developed during the Victorian times in England, when many poor women needed something to do to decorate their homes cost-free and even to make things to sell.
While the example templates are easy and simple, Victorian women got pretty creative making extremely fine beads with items such as wallpaper, newspapers and other paper they could get their hands on.
Bead garlands are a common Christmas decoration, and are often made of round wood beads painted red, white, green or gold. However, wooden beads are expensive.
As Pinterest and Instagram are the perfect places to gather and save DIY projects, patterns and recipes, paper beads are the perfect way to recycle all those magazines you collected for these projects that you never used and no longer need.
By cutting strips of paper, tapered to a point or straight, and rolling them tightly around a skewer or dowel before gluing the last piece down to secure it, you can easily make the beads for your garland.
If you don’t like the magazine scrap look, you can paint your own patterns on the beads with acrylic paint before sealing them with a gloss varnish, artist fixative or clear nail polish.
Paper buntingPaper doilies are good for plating or displaying baked goods, but what do you do with them after the party when they’re stained with oil marks and other food-related juices?
You stain them with coffee or watercolour paint! Then you fold them over a long string and glue them down after they’ve dried. Now you have bunting to hang up over the lunch table.
You can also cut the doily into multiple triangles and stick the lacy cut-out part to the string for the more traditional triangular look. If you want clean, white bunting you can just use unused doilies.
Alternatively, you can make tassel bunting with leftover gift wrapping paper, using the slivers that always go in the trash. Just cut the paper into thin strips, fold a handful at a time over a long piece of string and tie them together with a ribbon.
Fabric chainDo you have a lot of scrap fabric lying around? Maybe you have old worn clothes that are too pretty for floor rags or off-cuts from creative projects. You can cut them into equal-sized rectangles, sew them together and sew the strips around each other to form a more fancy and permanent version of paper chains.
When sewing the rectangles together, put two strips together, right sides facing each other (the side with the print on) and sew along three of the sides with a machine, or by hand with a back stitch.
Then, flip the rectangle inside-out, fold in the last side and sew it closed. For a neater, more sturdy strip, sew around the whole rectangle close to the edge. Then, like you would with a paper chain, sew the finished rectangles around each other in loops.
This can also be done with painted or printed cardboard, but this version won’t last as many Christmases as paper and cardboard is prone to breaking down or tearing.
Another option is to make bows with the strips of fabric, secure them in the middle with a few stitches and sew the loops together to make a bow-garland.
Pipe cleaner door wreathsIf you have spare cardboard boxes lying around, you can make a small wreath for every door in the house using the cardboard and some pipe cleaners. To make the wreath, cut cardboard into circular rings or doughnuts, and wrap green pipe cleaner around it tightly to cover the cardboard.
To decorate the wreaths, you can glue on beads or bows, or you can make the decorations out of pipe cleaners as well. For candy canes you can wrap a red pipe cleaner and a white one around each other, cut it into roughly 3cm long pieces and bend the top over to form the hook.
For bows you can use a ribbon bow, or you can make one from pipe cleaners as well. It’s made just like a regular bow with the two bunny ears method, where you make two loops and knot them together.
Pipe cleaners come in a variety of colours and textures, including tinsel cleaners that will give your mini wreath a sparkly tinsel wrap on top of the green. The possibilities are endless, and they definitely cost less than a store-bought wreath.
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