A Photo Garland for the Grandparents
Grandparents are always happy to receive photos of their own children as well as their grandchildren. Especially nowadays when families don’t often get the chance to gather all together, a photo gift for Christmas is a good chance to bring them joy. This will make them feel close to their loved ones even when they're far away. You can put a new spin on the run-of-the-mill garland by creating your own photo garland using a clothes hanger and transform it to a real head-turner this Christmas season.
Collect Things for Decorating
All you’ll need is a clothes hanger, a few things for decorating, some photos or photo greeting cards, and a bit of time to put everything together. Just rummage through your house for things like wooden clothes pegs, or in your sewing kit for buttons, string, fabric, wool, or silk ribbon. For this project you can use anything that catches your eye. You can also use things from Mother Nature to decorate your garland: small Christmas tree limbs, fir cones, moss, acorns, or even nuts. The perfect photos or photo greeting cards to decorate the garlands with, along with a little message from the grandchildren, can be ordered online with ease from ifolor.
Lots of Ways to Create Your Own Photo Garland - How It’s Done
Simple Variations
Wooden clothes hangers with a base work especially well for this project. The base of the hanger can serve as a place to attach strings or ribbons on which you can then hang your photos. You can find ideas of how to further decorate your hanger below. The photos or photo greeting cards you’ve already selected to use for your garland can be attached with clips to the string or ribbon.
Make your photos into little tags by cutting your photos into a shape (e.g. a circle, heart, square, triangle, etc.), and then glue them onto a piece of high quality paper that is the same shape. You can use a piece of paper that is just a bit bigger than your photos so that it functions as a kind of border for your photo. Besides paper, you could also use foam rubber or felt to create your photo tags. Then, just punch a small hole at the top of the photo in its border and thread some kind of string / cord through the hole. You are then ready to hang the photo from the base of the hanger. Make sure to use different lengths of string when hanging the photos so they’re not all sitting at the same height. You could even hang a few pairs of small bells in between your photos. This will really ensure the Christmas mood comes alive.
If you have quite a few clothes hangers with a base and made from the same material, you can easily use them to create your own Christmas tree on which you can hang your photos. First, just take a hanger and hang it on a wall hook. Then take two other clothes hangers and hang them on the base of the first hanger so the tree gets wider as you go along. Repeat this step as much as you’d like. At about the fourth row, you’ll need three clothes hangers. Once your tree is finished, it’s time to decorate it - secure your photos with clips or you could attach your self-crafted photo tags to the tree. You can add a bit more of a Christmassy feel to your tree by using some small Christmas tree branches and perhaps some Christmas tree ornaments.
Choosing a Clothes Hanger
You can give your creativity free roam while doing this project. Thus, we’d like to give you a few ideas of what else you could do. Clothes hangers are normally made of materials like plastic, wood, or wire. Should you use hangers made of wire, you have the ability to reshape them. Before decorating these hangers, you could bend them into the form of a heart, Christmas tree, star, or perhaps a circle. A small pair of pliers can be helpful here.
For arts and crafts enthusiasts: you can make your own clothes hangers. Start with a stable tree limb found in the forest and put a large screw hook on the top side in the middle. You can then put smaller screw hooks on the front side of the limb so you can use them to hang your photos. You’re already finished creating your own clothes hanger!
Product tip:
You can order your Digital Photos in various sizes online.
Photo Greeting Cards, which you can print out with text, are also perfect for the photo garland.
Other Ideas - Decorating Your Clothes Hanger
Should you have more time to spend on this project, we’ll give you some tips how you can beautify your clothes hanger before you hang your photos.
- Crochet some wool around the hanger. Fitting colours for Christmas would be green, red, or white
- Another idea is to create a little costume for your clothes hanger. Take some cloth that is fitting for Christmas and sew a little cover. It’ll look like a little jacket for the hanger in triangular form.
- Wrap some wool, ribbon, string, fir springs, or whatever else you might have around the hanger.
- Paint the clothes hanger with a colour that is fitting for Christmas and after it dries you can write your own little Christmas message on the paint.
- Use the clothes hanger as a picture frame. You can print out a special photo of yours in a large format and affix it to the rear side of the hanger so the photo is visible from the front. A wooden hanger is well suited for this since you can screw in smaller screw hooks into the wide base and add other decorations or photo tags (just as described above).