Ten Dollar, Ten Minute Wreath

As you may know, I like making wreaths. Most of ’em tend to be of the ephemeral type, not lasting more than a season so that I have justification in making new ones later on. Somehow though I have ended up with a few in storage … not that this will stop me from making yet another one. It’s officially December, so I think it’s time.

The one for this year is inspired by the super 1980s brass trim on my front door, and by what I snagged from Value Village on Senior’s Day a while back. I found a totally plain grape wreath for $1.99, a bag of gold bead garland for $1.99, and a box of glass balls in gold and copper for $3.99.

The only other thing I used for this was some fishing line I had on hand so I made the whole thing for less than ten bucks (including tax), and it only took me about ten minutes!

First I had to untangle the giant bag of beaded garland. That may have taken longer than ten minutes …

But then I wrapped a section around the wreath. Easy peasy. It didn’t go all the way but that was fine because I had a plan.

Then I tied the balls on with fishing line.

LongJohn helped. I can now do things by myself provided that I’m sitting three feet from him in his Jolly Jumper.

That’s it!

Fall Leaf Wreath

I’m not sure how it came about, but making wreaths from scratch has become one of my favourite DIYs in recent years. I love coming up with an idea  and seeing it come to fruition – sometimes better than I’d planned.

I spent about 20 minutes gathering these leaves from the local park. They all came from the same tree, so they were the same general shape, but they had a good variance of colour, which I liked. I divided my pile in half, and set one half aside.

Then I got out my craft paint and paint brushes.

Then I started painting the other half of the leaves. Nothing too elaborate or detailed – just something to make the leaf still interesting to look at once it’s shriveled and turned brown.

I did this for a while.

Like, an hour or so.

My favourites are the ones I painted with glitter paint, so the leaf colour shines through but then the light catches on the glitter and they’re just lovely.

Then I cut out a half-assed circle from some scrap cardboard. Yep, that’s freehand. No sense in being perfect on something that doesn’t need to be perfect.

While the painted leaves were drying, I took my hot glue gun and started attaching the unpainted leaves to the cardboard ring.

I tried to line it up mostly along the edges, with the larger leaves on the outside and smaller ones on the inside.

Then I filled in the centre a bit, because I knew the leaves would get wrinkly as they dried up over time.

Then I started inserting the painted leaves under and over and around.

Finally got every single one on there.

The whole thing, in poor lighting.

A snippet of one side, for the detail.

I tacked it to my front door, which is sheltered from the elements. I’m interested to see how it’s going to look in a week or two once the leaves go brown – you can see that just after one day they’re starting to curl already. I’ll add a photo when it gets there.

 

***EDIT***

And here it is, fully shriveled. I like how it turned out!

Rainbow Heart Wreath

So, half the reason I’m having people for dinner on Friday is to spend the night with friends and all that mushy crap.  The other half is so that I can go all out on decorations so that I have bloggable activities for you.  So I hope you’re happy.

I’m actually not super happy with how this turned out, so I might try to do it again soon.  But it was super easy, so it’s not like it’s going to be hard.

I happened to be in possession of a few pads of pastel rainbow coloured scrapbook paper (a thin cardstock thickness).  And I am not a scrapbooker.  That is a little intense even for me.  I also have this fancy schmancy new paper cutter that I got for Christmas, because neither the Pie nor my parents will trust me with a guillotine paper cutter (which, I must point out, is ridiculous, because I used to use one for a living and never cut myself, but anyway …).  I also have a stapler.  Nothing fancy about it, save perhaps that it is pink.  I’d tell you that it belongs to the Pie but that would be a falsehood.  It’s mine.  My pink stapler.  SURPRISE.

*Ahem* Anyway.  Each sheet of paper was 8″ square so that made my life easy.

I sliced it into 1″ wide strips — see how the sheet is double-sided with two different colours?  I like that.

Anyway, fold each strip in half, like so.

Then bring the ends in towards each other.  You can just fasten the ends and the heart looks a little bit more pretty, but it’s not as structurally strong.

So I brought the ends all the way into the fold, gave it a pinch …

… and stapled it all together.

And did that a bunch of times.

While Grenadier ignored me.

Or pretended to ignore me.

I did it with a few more pieces of paper, 8 hearts per colour.  Gren subtly got closer and closer.

Until, like the secret cat he actually is, he was lying on my hearts.  Well, he’s always got my heart in any case.

By the time I’d finished with all the colours, he’d gotten bored and gone away again.

So now I had these hearts, 48 in total.

Can I make a wreath with 48 hearts?  Yes, but it looks terrible. And is gigantic.

So I started putting them together in chains, like this.  I used plain clear adhesive tape for this.

Very festive.  I didn’t pay attention to which inside-outside hearts were where and I like the non-pattern-ness of it.  Is that a word?

This is how I wanted it to look originally, and this is all taped together in a lovely fashion.

However as soon as I lifted it, it immediately collapsed under its own weight. Quel dommage!

So I did a more compact version that mirrored the shape of the wee paper hearts themselves.  And taped the crap out of it so it would stay in the shape I wanted it to.

I think there’s a little bit too much tape showing pretty much everywhere and the wreath bears a strong resemblance to a pretzel but it’s a start.

***EDIT: So I tried again, with the same number of hearts, but this time I stapled them so they looked more conventional.  Then I used a hole punch to make a way to string them onto fishing twine.

And now I have a garland.  I kind of like it.

Forgive the pictures. The dining room is the darkest room in the house.

Bay Leaf Wreath

It’s getting to be that sort of holiday season, isn’t it?  I have a post coming up for you about some decorations on the cheap that I did last year, but in the interim, if you’ve got a bit more time, why don’t you make yourself a new wreath?

For some reason, at some point my mother bought an enormous bag of bulk bay leaves.  And she has used probably three of them in the past five years.  And even dried bay leaves don’t hold their flavour for five years.  Rather than throw them out, however, I thought I would make a seasonally-appropriate wreath with them instead.

Normally when I’m making a wreath I buy a cheap ugly pre-made one from a second-hand store and then I take it apart. This time I bought a styrofoam wreath form from Michaels instead. I was SHOCKED at how expensive they are! This 11″ one cost me a whopping TWELVE DOLLARS. For a piece of styrofoam. Next time I’ll cut my own out of computer packaging or something, thank you very much … Fortunately I also found a bag of assorted jingle bells at Value Village for two dollars so that saved me. And of course I had my trusty glue gun on hand.

The first thing I did was spray the wreath form all over silver with spray paint. Which was when I learned that even craft spray paint will dissolve styrofoam a little bit. Yikes.  I did this just in case there were any gaps in my leaves.  I wanted the whole thing to be silver.

I wanted my jingle bells to stand in as pseudo-berries, so I wanted to spray them red. However, I wanted them to be a frosty red, so I only sprayed one side of each one with red spray paint. If you wanted to spray all sides of each jingle bell I would recommend threading them on a long string so you can get all sides evenly.

Next I sorted out my bay leaves (pitching the broken ones) and sketched out a rough plan.

Then I started gluing. I used smaller leaves on the outside and inside edges of the wreath, so they would fit better.

Once I finished gluing on the leaves in the centre of the wreath, I started shoving random leaves in here and there, to fill in gaps but also to make the whole thing look a little less perfect.

So that’s with all the leaves glued on. If my bay leaves had been fresher I would have left this as-is for a nice festive green, but of course mine were past their prime and thus looked a little sickly.

This is my idea for how the bells were going to fit on. I was just going to group them in little batches and glue them on.

So after I sprayed the wreath silver again to cover up all the green bits, I got my bells ready to go.

To my dismay, however, I discovered that hot glue doesn’t stick to spray-painted bay leaves.

In fact it just peels the paint right off.

New plan. I grabbed my old spool of fishing twine and got to work with it.

I strung a handful of assorted bells on a loop of twine and tied the twine in a knot to keep them tight.

Then I simply tied the twine around the wreath form, weaving it under what leaves I could to hide it for the most part.

Then on the back I added a spot of glue to each twine loop to hold it in place.

And glued a nice blue ribbon on the top.

And then I hung it up. TADA!

Adding Festivity, the Lazy Way: Paper Wreath

Seeing as we’re in Ottawa and not St. John’s for the majority of the holiday season, the Pie and I rarely trouble ourselves to decorate Elizabeth for Christmas.  But this little thing was so easy, and so quick, and the days here in St. John’s have been so very gray, I needed a little festivity … but I was too lazy to do anything too complicated.

So I have here some rolls of wrapping paper that I picked up from IKEA about seven years ago, and which I rarely use (seeing as I still have a chunk left).  The nice thing is that the wrapping paper, since it came on a roll, has a natural curve to it that I used to my advantage.  I also have a large paper plate with an extremely ugly design on it.  I don’t even know how I came to own these things, but I was cleaning out a cupboard and there they were … You will also need a pair of decent scissors and some tape.  Any kind, really, as you won’t see it.  A ribbon is optimal but also optional.

First, we need to make a wreath form out of the paper plate.  If you want something bigger (or less ugly), you can make your own ring out of cardboard or whatever is handy.  With the paper plate all I had to do was cut out the middle section.

Then I cut about a 5″ wide strip from the roll of wrapping paper.  I folded it in half lengthwise, so it was then about 2.5″ thick, and then folded it across itself widthwise a couple times, until I had a small rectangle about 2.5″ x 5″.  Or whatever works for you.  This just makes it easier to cut a bunch of leaves at once. This is where having a nice sharp, strong pair of scissors comes in handy.

Then I cut a leaf shape out of the rectangle, leaving the bottom a little flattened (for optimal tape-age), and ended up with a handful of little leaves.  I did this twice for each colour of wrapping paper I used, so six times in total. I have no idea how many leaves it was, but it was exactly enough for the size of my project, which was pretty convenient — almost like I had a plan.

Then I started taping them onto the plate, putting a wee bit of tape at the flattened end of the leaf, and making them kind of flow around the circle.  Don’t worry about making them arrow straight, and try to pick up different colours at random.

When you put on the next haphazard row, it overlaps the first and hides the tape (this is called imbrication – like the layering of scales or roofing shingles).

Imbrication … (I learned the word today so it’s rather convenient that I have this project for you)

When you come full circle (and I don’t mean that metaphorically this time), just fold up the leaves already there and tuck the new ones into the space to fill the gap.

So that’s the whole thing.

I had a scrap of blanket binding leftover from the baby blanket I made for the Incredibly Little Hulk way back when, so I tied that on as ribbon.

Then I added another ribbon to hang it on my door.

This took me half an hour, from start to finish.  Change the colours of the paper leaves and I’m sure you could apply this wreath to any season (black and orange for Hallowe’en, purple and green for spring …).  Easy peasy, blamo kablam, it’s done!

Imbricaaaaaaaation: an overlapping of edges as in tiles or scales.