Colorful Easter Garland

Hello and Happy almost Easter! I wanted to do something crafty this year to decorate the house for Easter and I came across this fun post from Pinterest that had a DIY Easter Garland. I thought it would look cute hanging on our fireplace mantle and it seemed easy enough to make.





Supplies
Ballons
Colored yarn/string
Flour
Liquid starch

Steps

1. Decide how many eggs you want on your garland, how large you want the eggs to be, and blow the balloons up accordingly. I decided to do about a dozen smaller sized eggs for mine.  

2. Next determine how much liquid starch you will need to coat all the yarn/string you will use and mix 2 parts liquid starch to 1 part flour. I wasn't sure how much I would need so I started out with 1 cup liquid starch and 1/2 cup flour. You can always add more later if needed. I ended up having about a third of it leftover, which worked out great so I wasn't scraping the bowl at the end to coat my string.

3. Coat the string in the starch/flour mixture. I decided to use one color per balloon and it was just about the right amount of string. A *very important* tip is to put the string into the mixture in a circular pattern (see below), being very careful not to twist it around itself. This really helps prevent knots when pulling the string out and around the balloon. Once it's sticky, it's impossible to untangle. Carefully push the string into the mixture if it hasn't sunk in completely already. This step took the longest out of everything.  

4. Wrap the string around the balloon. I didn't want to have too much mixture on the string, so I pulled it between my fingers as I pulled it out of the bowl to get rid of the excess. Then I wrapped the string around and around, trying to cover the open space on the balloon as much as possible. I'm not going to lie, this step was messy. I had to clean my hands in between each string because they would get so sticky and made it impossible to add the next string to the mixture.

5. Place the wrapped balloons on a paper towel to dry. If there is excess mixture on your balloon, I would try to wipe as much of that off first so it doesn't soak through the paper towel too much. I let my balloons sit for about a day, turning them over halfway through so that both sides had a chance to dry.

Most of the eggs turned out pretty well. I had a couple funky ones, like the white one below, that I had to chuckle about because I have no idea how the string got so wavy. I think the balloon may have had a small leak and became smaller as the string was drying.

6. After the string has completely dried, pop the balloon and pull it out from the string. Tweezers are very helpful here if the balloon breaks into pieces. For the most part, once I popped the balloon, the entire thing detached itself from the string and I could pull it out in one piece.

7. String the eggs together. I forgot to get extra string for this step, so I used dental floss and it worked great. :) I found it helpful to hold the egg sideways and drop the floss from the top and use gravity to my advantage to get the floss through to the bottom. Then I made a small knot around the string for each egg so it stayed in place on the line.

These turned out better than I was expecting. It was a fun project despite the occasional frustration of keeping the string untangled and super messy fingers. The eggs could also be placed in a basket or clear vase for decoration.  

Happy Easter!

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