DIY Wood Bead Garland for only $1.25!

Hey friends! Today I’m sharing my DIY wood bead garland that I made for only $1.25!

It’s my contribution to this month’s edition of Thrifty Style Team! Each month I join 10 talented bloggers to bring you decor ideas that are both stylish and thrifty! You can check out the rest of the Thrifty Style Team member’s projects at the end of this post!

Redhead Can Decorate | 2 Bees in a Pod | Bliss Ranch | Chatfield Court | Cottage at the Crossroads | DIY Beautify | Duke Manor Farm | I Should be Mopping the Floor | Salvage Sister and Mister | The Painted Hinge | What Meegan Makes

For this project, you will need:

• Wood beads
• Jute twine
• 6 x 9 clipboard (optional)
• Scissors
• Glue gun and hot glue (somewhat optional – I’ll explain later in the post)

I picked up the wood beads I’m using for this project at a flea market for 25 cents. I got the jute twine at the dollar store for – you guessed it! – one dollar. That means this wood bead garland only cost me $1.25 to make! If you can’t find any wood beads at flea markets, the dollar stores usually sell them too. So even if you can’t find wood beads at the flea market and you buy them at the dollar store, this wood bead garland would only cost you $2.00 to make.

On to the project! I strung the beads onto the jute twine. I didn’t cut the twine first because I wanted to use all the beads I had, and I didn’t want to guesstimate and end up cutting it too short.

You can make your wood bead garland as long or short as you like. When I made this, I wasn’t shooting for a particular length – I just wanted to use all the beads I had. It turned out to be about 3 feet long with the tassels.

Once I had all the beads strung on the twine, I cut the twine leaving myself a generous amount of twine on each end to work with.

Now to make the tassels. I clipped the end of jute twine onto the board and wrapped the twine around 10 times, then cut the twine and clipped that end onto the board as well.

The clipboard is optional – you can do this with a piece of cardboard, a piece of wood, a thin hardcover book, etc. It just makes it a lot easier to work with the twine without the ends slipping off. If you use something other than a clipboard, make sure that it measures 9 inches if you want the same size tassels like I made.

This part is a little hard to explain so please bear with me. I flipped the clipboard over and starting at the middle of the clipboard ran one end of the beaded twine underneath the twine on the clipboard. Then I flipped the clipboard over, wrapped the beaded twine end around the side of the clipboard to the top, and again ran the beaded twine underneath the twine on the clipboard. The idea here is to “catch” the twine on both sides of the clipboard with the beaded twine.

I slid the twine off the clipboard and tied it in the middle with the beaded twine. I then cut the loops open on both ends.

Starting just below where I tied the twine, I used a small drop of hot glue to attach twine to the tassel and then wrapped the tassel moving upward until I got to the top of the tassel, then I used another small drop of hot glue to secure it to the tassel and then trimmed the end. Remember when I said before that the hot glue was somewhat optional? There are ways to tie the top of the tassel on without using hot glue, but I had a really hard time doing it. Using the hot glue was so much easier and gave the tassel a much cleaner look.

I trimmed the tassel ends with scissors to get them more even. I then repeated this process to make a tassel on the other end of the wood bead garland.

We have 11 cats, so whenever I’m working with any kind of string, it’s never too long before one or more of our cats shows up to “help.” 🙂 This is Little Bit, who always enjoys photobombing my projects.

Here’s my finished wood bead garland. I’m really happy with how it turned out!

I love how the wood bead garland adds visual interest and pulls all the items in a vignette together like it did above.

I hope you enjoyed my DIY wood bead garland project! Check out all the other projects by the Thrifty Style Team below!

Happy thrifting!