Quick and Easy Valentine's Garland

I did a little multitasking during my afternoon TV time on Friday. Melissa, who blogs at I Still Love You, is always writing about how fun and easy it is to sew paper (for instance here, here, and here) so I wanted to give it a try too.

I made a little template by free-handing a heart on a piece of scrap paper and then folded up four pieces of printer paper so I could cut out a bunch of hearts at once. I was going to do all white, but then I decided I wanted a little color in my garland too, so I cut more hearts out of a single piece of red construction paper.

I stacked up all the hearts and took them to my sewing machine, which was already loaded up with white thread from this project. I just fed the hearts into the machine one at a time, trying (not always sucessfully) not to overlap them so the garland would still have some movement. Sewing all of them took about five minutes, and that was with me going slowly. Then I taped the garland to the ceiling between my kitchen and dining area.

I like this project because I had all the materials on hand so it was free, the mistakes I made are not noticable, and it makes a big statement for very little effort.

Are you doing any seasonal decorating? Have you ever sewn paper?