The Book Garland

I am in no way saying that this garland was an original idea by me. I got the idea, supply list and how to from Martha Stewart. But for as awesome as Martha Stewart is, her online how-to's are not always very clear. I like a lot of pictures, and she has more text instructions. So this here is how I made my version of her book garland.

First, I'll show you how we made the books. Instead of going out to buy various shades of pink, we decided to just use the scrap-booking paper I had on hand in a variety of colors. We kept them all soft colors of pink, green, purple and brown so they went well together.

I cut the scrap-book paper the dimensions Martha suggested of 4" x 7". 

The description of how to fold the spine confused me, so here is how I did it. Place the paper wrong side up, fold over the right half of the paper so the right edge is 1/2" inside the left edge. Press the fold firmly. Open it up, and fold the it mirror image. (So the left edge is 1/2" inside the right edge.)

Now you should have a 1/2" spine, like this:

The next step is to glue in the book pages. We used an old book of mine. We found that the pages weren't quite wide enough for the 7 inches, so we cut a bit into the text on the left side of a page, and then glued two pages together with a glue stick. Cut the page to just under 4 inches tall.

To glue the pages in, I found it easiest to apply glue from the glue stick right into the 1/2" spine, and attach the pages there. For ease of folding, I made sure that the page seam was inside the spine.

I trimmed off the over hang on either side.

This last step is optional. We left half alone, with just the two folds. The other half, I folded the book into the center to meet and make a more prominent spine. It also holds the book open more. It was nice to have half this way and half without the extra folds, because it gave it more variety of both open and closed books.

And there you are. Make a bunch! Overall I think we used just under 50 for our garland.

Now, for the flowers. I went to the dollar store to find inexpensive flowers for this. I was just about to give up and walk out when I saw the "Luao Party" section, and these leis.

I brought them home, cut the string and pulled off the flowers!

This one lei got me about 70 flowers and a handful of leaves. I threw away the plastic spacers.

Here's the result of tearing apart 6 leis. Over 400 flowers!!

I used some left over black nylon twine I had from crocheting a purse a few years ago for the string. I used a yarn needle and threaded right through the center of the flowers onto the string. Despite my plethora of flowers, I only ended up using about 60 or 70 flowers and a few of the leaves.

Lena tied the string to the curtain rods on one side and we taped the string with masking tape on the other wall. See the flowers all bunched up? We just spaced them out after the string was secure.

The last step we took was to add the books by hanging them with little clothespins. Martha Stewart also had ribbon flags and star shaped cut-outs glued to her string; but we thought that would be overkill, especially with how densely we packed in the books and flowers.

Here's the end result! It was a huge hit.