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Sprucing up your Christmas displays with a handmade decoration or two is a fun way to spend an evening in the run-up to Christmas. Our fun Mini Cracker Light Garland is perfect for using up your Stick It Lampshade making PVC scraps and paired with your favourite festive fabric and some sparkly ribbon, they'll make a unique and twinkly addition to any home. We'll be making a few for stocking fillers too!
Using our OLFA Circle cutter for the first time, we've really enjoyed making the cute peak-a-boo holes in our crackers. Simply follow the step-by-step tutorial below to make your own!
What you’ll need to make your Festive Mini Cracker LED light garland
Stick It Lampshade Making PVC - 10 pieces of 9 x 9cm
Festive fabric - 10 pieces of 9 x 19cm
Belt punch
30 Butterfly clips or brads (usually used for scrapbooking)
6mm ribbon – 1.5 metres
Pencil
Ruler
Elastic band
How to make your Christmas cracker LED light garland
1. Prepare your Olfa Circle Cutting tool, by setting the distance between the blade and the compass point to 1.5cm.
2. Find the centre of your first 9 x9 cm piece of Stick It Lampshade Making PVC and mark with a pencil or pen. Position the compass point of the Olfa Circle Cutting tool on the mark, then push down the blade gently and rotate to cut out a 3cm circle.
3. Press your pieces of fabric. Remove the backing paper from the PVC and position this on wrong side of the fabric with a margin of 5 cm of fabric at either side. Turn over to check the fabric is sitting smoothly.
4. Using your belt punch, punch three holes along the edge of the PVC, along the long edge, around 3mm away from the edge.
5. Gently bend the edges of the PVC towards each other and mark through the holes with a pencil, onto the wrong side of the PVC.
6. Punch the holes out using the pencil marks as a guide. Run double sided tape along one edge of PVC piece, between the holes.
9. Remove the backing from the tape and roll the PVC into a tube. Use an elastic band or hair bobble here to hold the tube in place if needed. Push a butterfly clip or brad through the holes and open up to secure the tube in place.
TOP TIP: Open the brads slightly , before you push through the holes. This will make the wings easier to open by touch, when they are inside the tube.
10. Repeat the steps 1-9 to make your remaining nine crackers.
11. Thread the LED through each cracker and space out until you are happy with the arrangement. Cut your ribbon into 15 cm lengths and tie each end of the cracker secure to hold the LED lights in place. Double knot.
12. Trim the ribbons back to a suitable length.
OLFA Circle cutter
We loved how simple the OLFA circle cutter made...well cutting super accurate circles. Well designed and really quick to set up, we can see plenty of opportunities for this handy tool in our future lampshade making, for creating cut outs, adding circles to the inside of lampshades and for designing patterns.
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