A hug, A kiss and good luck!

So tonight my nephew graduated! I could not be more proud of him. I always told myself that no matter what I would try to treat the first 4 the same. Last year I made this really cool lei for his older brother, so this year I decided to do the same one for Cam since it was a huge hit! More pics to come later on the graduation. Today, I thought I would do a tutorial for this lei so those who would like to make one can. Here we go....

Here is what you need to make it: 100 crisp $1. If they are crisp they will keep their shape. I just called my bank and the got me some brand new $1. Hersey kisses and hugs. I bought a mixed bag and it seems 90% of it was kisses, but it was cheaper than buying 2 separate bags.

Plastic wrap. His school colors are purple and silver, luckily I already had purple plastic wrap. Ribbon and scissors.

The first thing you are going to do is take 10 of your dollars, pinch them in the center, take a piece of ribbon and tie them in a knot in the middle. Put them aside. This is going allow you to gill in the gaps later. (give or take a few)

Next you are going to take a long string of ribbon (about 6 feet, give or take) and start at one end. Make sure you leave enough room at the end to tie the ends together. Pinch your dollar and tie a knot around it. 

Grab another dollar, pinch it and tie a knot around that one, trying to keep the knots as close as possible (see pic below). If the knots are not that close, don't worry too much about it. That is why you have the 10 tied individually (give or take). 

Continue pinch and tying until you run out of ribbon. (make sure to leave a little room on the end to tie together!)

As you can see I didn't get the knot close enough so when I held it up, there was this gap. 

I took one of the individual dollar bills and tied it in to the gap (You can do this as you go or at the end of doing your lei.)

See, you cant even tell there was a gap!

I ran out of ribbon so I cut another long one (I ended up doing 3 that were approx. 6 feet long) and started a new line. When I ran out of money, I connected the three strands of tied up money. Don't worry about having it perfect because no one can see the knots. I then held up my lei to find the gaps and fill them in with my remaining individually tied dollars.
 

Here is what it should look like once you have connected it all...

I think took my plastic wrap and cut them in to square (the size had no rhyme or reason) I then filled them with 3-4 hugs and kisses intermixed. 

I twisted the plastic wrap and tied it with ribbon. 

I then tied my hugs in to the lei. I think I did 10 of them randomly placed. 

To wrap up the lei I curled the ends of the ribbons to add texture but to hide my imperfect knots. 

Here is what is looks like at the end.

 

Here is Cam, just so you can see the length on this. 

 Now you dont have to use $100. This is just what I set for my nephews. You can cram more hugs and kisses in there and less money and still make it look good. I would not recommend using less than $50.
You also can use whatever colors you would like. Purple and silver happened to be his school colors so I stuck with those colors but feel free to add more ribbon and colors if you would like.
I am not a proffesional when it comes to these. This was self taught. There may be an easier way to do this than to individually tie each dollar in but I could just see someone cutting the string or it getting snagged and the money going everywhere. It was work to tie them individually but I would rather have that than take a chance of it breaking and losing all that money. (The first time I made this was by trial and error. It took me over two hours. This time it took me about an hour and a half, with stopping to take pictures and such, so take your time.)

I hope this all made sense and some of you are encouraged to try this. It was fun and both years it drew alot of attention. Leave comments, let me know how it works for you!

Good luck and dont get lei'd!