Paper shoe garland (with or without a digital cutter)

Hi friends! I am really excited about this project, more excited over paper and napkins than I ever thought possible.  I mentioned previously a shoe-themed party I put together.  This began my crush on paper shoes.  One item used for decoration at our shoe-themed party were these paper shoe garlands that I dreamed up.

Aren't they fun?!

I must begin with a confession. I think there is a certain solidarity among those of us who are still cutting with good old-fashioned scissors instead of fancy digital cutters.  It is because of this, I am a little ashamed to admit that I sold out -for this project anyway.  I had every intention of making my paper shoes by hand, I even found this template from Skip to My Lou and was ready to go.  However, my friend, Katrina, kindly offered to cut them on her Cricut digital cutting machine.  Considering we needed 80 shoes for the party, you bet your sweet bippy I took her up on the offer (my motto is K.I.S.S., after all)  Please don't despair if you don't have a digital cutter, Skip to My Lou has you covered with her tutorial.  If you have crossed over to the dark side and own a Silhouette or Cricut or other fancy-pants cutting apparatus:

A) I secretly envy you
B) Check out this fun template for paper shoes

Regardless of how you cut them, here are the directions for assembling your Paper Shoe Garland.


Supplies

• Grosgrain ribbon, string or twine cut to your desired length (mine were 7.5 ft long to fit the tables we used)

• Six pair of paper shoes

• Four or five wallflowers made of napkins

• Hot glue

Directions  

1. Follow the paper shoe tutorial from Skip to My Lou to make your shoes (she added a patterned liner to all of her shoes which was darling, but we skipped this step due to the copious amounts of shoes needed)

2. Use the Wallflower tutorial from Made to make your flowers

3. Lay out your ribbon on the floor, place your shoes and flowers on top of it and adjust the spacing to your liking

4. Hot glue everything in place.


Tips

• Because of the weight of the shoes and flowers, I found that it looked better to hang it straight across the table edge (with a lot of tape) rather than trying to make a swag.

• DO NOT glue your garland to your floor or table when assembling.  It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?  Look, hot glue has a tendency to ooze and when I picked my garland up off the floor, it was stuck in a few places

• If you do glue your garland to the floor, a butter knife and a lot of patience will usually remove it.

• Katrina found that hot glue was the best adhesive for assembling the paper shoes.

• Depending upon the template you use for paper shoes, you may need to reduce the size of the template if you want to fit two shoes on one sheet of 12x12 paper.

• Because we needed so many shoes, we used a pad or stack of 48 coordinating scrapbook papers {Mi Casa from Die Cuts with a View}.  This is generally a good cost saver over buying individual sheets of 12x12 paper (the stacks at my local craft store are about $12 with a 40% off coupon).  Since the paper was all from the same collection, it gave us a lot of variety in patterns and colors while still providing a pulled-together look.

• Paper shoes provide almost as much euphoria as real shoes for a fraction of the cost

I am linking up to Wow Us Wednesdays at Savvy Southern Style and these great blogs.