When we started planning the shower for my brother and his fiancee, I went where I always go for inspiration… PINTEREST!! I had been seeing these cute paper dot garlands around the web and thought they would be perfect for the shower! (the picture below was my inspiration, but whoever pinned it originally didn’t put a link the original site… after some googling you can go here if you want to see the rest of that party)

So although this was about the complete opposite of our color scheme, this was our inspiration pic! But of course I had never made a paper garland before, but it looked like they were just sewn on a sewing machine… so I gave it the old college try! And you better believe you will see more of these at my parties!! IT WAS SOOOOO EASY (and quick and cheap… can’t beat that!).

I bought this guy at Joann’s with a 40% off coupon (seriously if you ever shop at there or Hobby Lobby, download their apps for coupons, they ALWAYS have a 40% off or more coupon!).  I think it cost me about $9.

I also bought 6 sheets of cardstock paper (and I swear those two gold sheets are the same, but they look very different here!):

And then I had a date with my couch and Modern Family, so I cut out all my dots

I made them as close to each other as possible, going around the edge of the paper, then cut off the scraps and kept going on the inner square.  And about one episode later (don’t you love projects you can measure in episodes watched??) I had this:

Now the really complicated part (here is where I need a sarcasm font): lay them out in the order you want

And feed them through your sewing machine one by one.  I had my foot pushed down about medium speed and would just wait until the dot before it was just past the needle and would stick the second dot in, that left about an 1/16th of an inch in between each dot.  But since my coordination skills leave a bit to be desired, some have wider spaces than others.  And ladies and gentlemen, we call that character.

The only other note I have is to leave some extra string at the beginning and end so that you will have something to hang them from.

And there my friends you have awesome color coordinated decorations for less that $5. (not counting the dot puncher since by the time I’m done making these for every party from now on the cost per garland will be negligible!)  But that’s enough finance talk… lets take a look at the final product shall we!?

And because I had a few extra gold ones I added them as a garland for the cheesecake