Tutorial: Beautiful Bubble Book Garland!

Well, hello! Nice to see you. We gather together today to witness the union of – er, the making of a beeeauuutiful garland made of book pages! (The tissue paper flower poufs are not included.)

Psst… you can see Weenie if you look close.

Tutorial: Bubble Book Garland

by Lady Awdur

You will need:

• Scissors
• A pencil
• Oodles of books that you don't mind cutting up (they'll be ruined)
• Something round to trace around (I used a cookie cutter with a 3-inch diameter)
• A ribbon, as long as you want the garland (I made BLANK garlands BLANK feet long, so I used around BLANK feet of ribbon. Mine was white and ¼ inch wide)
• A sewing machine (glue might work, too, but I didn't try this so I don't know)

How you do it:

First, trace twice as many circles as you'll need (you get three circles per foot, so if you wanted to make a three foot garland you would trace (3x3) x2 = 18 circles. Got it?). I traced 300. In most I did all words, in some (to vary it up) I got some of the picture:

I mean, it's Weenie. Who wouldn't want him in the garland?

Then, cut out the circles (that's pretty self-explanatory). After you have all of your circles cut out, you will need to prepare them for sewing. Unless you cut your papers from books that have no pictures or anything and all of them look the same, you might have a preference which side is up. The circles are double layered, so that they have some strength and aren't just floppy little pieces of paper, so one side of each circle will not be shown. If you care which side is in and which side is out, you'll want to lay them out. For instance, Weenie's other side looks like this:

It's just not Weenie.

And I much prefer Weenie, so I grabbed another circle and put them together with the sides I wanted facing out. Once you've prepared all of your circles and stacked them (not on top of each other but just barely overlapping so that you can grab one circle pair without grabbing more than one), you'll need to get out your sewing machine.

The overlapping stacks.

Prepare the ribbon by cutting one edge in a forked design to guard against fraying and make it look pretty. Lay it across the sewing machine and put down the presser foot.

Make sure you have some tail to tie the garland with. Grab a circle pair, place it under the ribbon, and sew all the way across. Keep sewing for ½ inch to 2 inches (whatever you think looks best) past the circle (you'll just be sewing on ribbon at this point), then add another circle pair (herewith referred to simply as a "circle"), sew across, sew for an inch or so on the ribbon, add another circle, and so on.

My garlands were made to hang vertically, so I did very short garlands, no more than 11 circles on each, so if you were doing horizontal garlands you'd have to figure out how many circle pairs you'd need to do.
When you've done as many as you want, cut the ribbon and the threads of the sewing machine. You're done!

Here's what they look like at the end:

Sorry the picture is so bad. Hey, I'm not a photographer.

Close-up of the forked tail.

Hopefully you don't mind how the ribbon twists a little in between. You could probably eliminate this by sewing each circle on individually instead of sewing from on end of the ribbon to the other. That seemed like too much work to me, though.

I sewed these on a Singer Fashion Mate 252 – how crazy it is that a machine from 1971 runs so much smoother than my 2005 Singer Simple machine?? I guess they really don't make them like they used to.

Au Revoir,

P.S. Does anyone know how to get other google fonts beside Arial, Courier, Georgia, Helvetica, Times, Trebuchet and Verdana on Blogger? I thought I had it figured out… but no.
EDIT: Thank you very much to The Author for helping me with the fonts!