Oh, My Paper Heart!

Confession: When we were sending out our Save-the-Dates, I may or may not have gotten a little overzealous on the ordering front. I ordered 200 prints of our design thinking that I needed one for each guest, and since we'd be having around 150 on the guest list, I though 200 was playing it safe. Welp, we sent out 75 Save-the-Dates. No, not because we had a dramatic decrease in our guest list, we just didn't need to send one to EACH guest individually. There were couples, and large and small families, so 75 was the number that needed to go out to get one to each household. Looking back, this seems pretty obvious to me, but I was nervous! I never had to send out any invites of any sort with paper, let alone anything to a guest list of this size. I just wanted to be cautious. But having over 100 surplus prints, I needed to find a way of recycling them into our wedding day decor!

I thought, you know...we have a serious lack (i.e. only have one) of garlands in our decor. And they are fun, easy to make, and pretty! So, I thought of making a paper chain with the extra STD cards, but not just any paper chain, a paper heart chain! I googled it, and found a bunch of tutorials, but I really liked this one the best. So simple, with great results!

Here's the How To:

First cut about 1 and 1/2 strips from whichever paper material you choose, then fold over the ends to make little lips, like so...

Then, fold the strips in half so that the mini lips at the ends you created face each other.

Next, your going to glue each side to the center to create the heart shape. I used Elmer's glue --- even though it didn't dry the quickest, it seems to hold the strongest (since I need to save all my hot glue for another project - which I'm almost done with! Yes! (Later)).

You glue the little lip things down
to the center fold. Like so.

One side done.

And when you've glued both down, it should look a little like this...

Yay! Save-the-Date, recycled into a cute little heart!

To connect the hearts, I used the extra scraps from the Save-the-dates that had already been cut into strips to make a little link and then glued them to a set of paper hearts. When you are finished, it will look something like this!

So there you have it! I made a chain that's probably five and a half feet long, and still have so many prints left (::embarrassed::), so looks like I'll be making another chain/finding new ways of recycling them. Do you have any over-orders that you've had to recycle somehow? How are you doing them? Any other paper-craft-obsessed brides out there?

Best,

Micah