Ribbon Paper Chain Decoration

It's Christmas So It Must Be Time For Paper Chains, Or Ribbon Ones Anyway...

As we move towards the festive season, we naturally start thinking of the things we are going to decorate the house with in order to add a splash of decorative colour and fun during this dark time of year.

Our household was no exception and over tea the other evening Jo and I started discussing decorations from our youth, crepe streamers and foil decorations immediately came to mind.

Jo then reminded me of making long lengths of paper chains as kids and getting out respective parents to display these!

This sparked a creative session as she decided to embark on making some chains with our children but instead of paper we were going to use Christmas Ribbons !!

Well why not.

Daisy our youngest was up for the challenge of choosing the colours and construction began.

This provide easier then we first thought it would be!

The secret it turned out was choosing the correct type of ribbon to make the chain lengths with in the first place.

At first we though that satin and sheers would work well but they transpired to be to flimsy for what we had in mind, so instead we went for the wide 63mm ribbons with wired edges and glitter patterns as these all helped make the ribbon stiffer.

As a result they held there shape well when looped.This also made it easier to fixed and close the loop of the ribbon.

Jo and the kids cut the ribbons roughly in to 20cm lengths, although it transpired that the exact size did not matter too much and some variance was fine.

We then looped these through each other in the exact same way you would if they were paper chains.

To seal them and hold them together we used a stapler as this was easy and quick so the kids could see some rapid progress. However you could use a number of different fixing methods and I am sure a glue gun would work well.

It was not long before we had a chain about two and a half metres long!

At this point no one could resist the urge to try it somewhere. The net result, we now have a very blue sparkly stair case!

To create our stairway chain we used four different reels of 63mm Christmas ribbon, these all held 10 yards of ribbon on each reel however we only used about half a reel of each design to make our chain, so had enough left over to make a second chain or add to the length of the first.

The only other ideas we used were, a sharpe pair of scissors a stapler and a couple of short lengths of narrow ribbon to fix each end of the chain with.

You can find all the ribbons that we used for our chain in our wide Christmas Ribbon section at Wired Christmas Ribbons