Dollhouse Miniature Christmas Garland

 

Watch the video here.

My cousin and I went shopping the other day and decided to cruise through the Hobby Lobby. I of course was looking for things to use in the dollhouse. This time of year is excellent for finding non-mini items that will work in the dollhouse because of all the Christmas decorations that are showing up in the stores. One of the items I found was this adorable mini garland. It is really pretty just as it comes and it would look really nice if draped against a dark colored surface. I wanted to use it on the front porch of

the Beachside Bungalow and it has a white railing on the porch. As pretty as the all white, slightly iridescent color was it just was lost again the white paint,.

 

My first plan was to paint the bead areas with red and green and the snowflakes with silver. I decided to use nail polish instead of paint because I knew it would be very durable if the garland gets bumped. Sometimes it is hard to get paint to adhere really nicely to the cheap plastic like this is made with. For items that will just sit somewhere that is usually not a problem. But I knew that the garland being on the railing on the front of the porch it is going to get bumped and brushed against just in the course of day to day life here. I knew that the nail polish would hold up to that abuse a lot better with basically no additional prep-work other than taking it out of the package. Also I love working with nail polish because of the beautiful colors and special finishes you can find. Also it has a beautiful gloss without having to add anther layer.

The silver I had on hand in my collection, it is labeled with the name Live on the label and the number 409 on the cap. I only had time to run down to my local Family Dollar in search of the red and green I hoped to use. They had a couple of nice reds, I went with one labeled as Fierce. However, they didn’t have a single color of green in stock. So we will just use the two colors.

These are just the cheap LA Colors polishes that are easy to find.

To apply the nail polish I used some of the micro brushes that I got off of e-bay a while back. They are pretty good for this project in that I don’t need to clean them, just throw them out when done. I did go through several of the brushes in this project.

I used some of those cheap clamps from the dollar store to hold the garland so it wouldn’t be touching anything as it dried. I found painting about 6” at a time was the best for me. Anymore than that and I started having issues with keeping it off my work surface.

I first painted the beads red on about 18” of the garland. Then I let that dry completely.

Once I had what I felt was enough of the beads colored red I went back and did the snowflakes with the silver polish. This was easier and quicker for a couple of reasons. First I had figured out what worked best for me with the beads. And secondly the snowflakes are bigger and flat so they are a lot easier to paint.

Be sure the nail polish is completely dry before trying to add the garland to your mini project.

To attach the garland to the porch rail I decided to use pieces of embroidery floss that matched the color of the railing. If I wasn’t trying to do this for you guys on camera I would have used just 3 of the 6 strands of floss but I felt that would have been much harder to deal with on camera. Little did I know that my cat was going to help so much with this step. He does make life interesting at times for sure.

Anyway, all you need to do is run the floss around both the railing and the garland and tie a simple knot. Once you are happy with the placement and drape of the garland trim off any excess floss and turn the knots to the back side of
the railing where they won’t be seen. I also just tucked the extra garland at each end behind the railing so it was out of the way and out of sight.

 

I hope you enjoyed the project I love how it looks with our other Christmas items on the porch.

As always I do want to sincerely thank all of you for watching my videos and reading my blog posts. It means so much to me that you are supporting me in this way. If I could ask you all to do just a bit more by subscribing to the channel and liking the videos and leaving comments. Those help more than you can imagine. Also if you could pass the links on to your friends I would appreciate it so much.