A few years ago, one of the Christmas gifts we made were strands of ribbon garland with sliced black walnuts & bows. I believe I saw the idea in a craft book somewhere…

We collected the seeds from around the farm, and had the boys remove the shells by pounding them through the holes in red bricks. A pretty messy job, but they didn’t seem to mind it too much, lol. Mike cut them into 1/4″ slices once they were nice & dry. (If my memory serves me correctly, I don’t think he was too fond of this part as it was a tedious task & many of the seeds broke while cutting. THIS IS WHY WE DON’T MAKE THE SAME CRAFT TWICE, LOL!!!) Then he sprayed them with some kind of clear varnish. Lastly, I bought a spool of satin-like ribbon and twine-looking string. I wove a double strand of it through the holes in the slices – twisting as I went. At each twist between slices I tied a bow with twine-looking string. As I recall, the ribbon was kinda pricey, so we made smaller strands of garland that work nice for a simple, tabletop tree. 🙂