More seasonal wreaths
14 November, 2016
Apparently wreaths are my new craft thing. In particular, seeing how little money I can spend while making a decent looking wreath. I was originally going to get a wreath frame from Michael's and add things to it, but they wanted $6 for a small ring of flimsy styrofoam. And $12 for the sturdier kind. Just a plain styrofoam ring. No thank you.
Fall leaves
I wanted a wreath for fall, and was looking for some sort of leaves I could put into a wreath shape. I found some cheap coasters at Bed, Bath and Beyond: three packs of 4 maples leaves for $2 each. Score. They came in nice muted fall colors, just what I was looking for.
I decided 12 leaves with a little overlapping would make a decent size for my door. I cut out a cardboard annulus from an old shipping box, making it thick enough to hold the leaves and its shape, without showing too much of the cardboard beneath. (As usual, I did not take step by step pictures.)
Then it was a matter of spacing them evenly, alternating colors, and hot gluing them in place. After they were all in place, I added a few extra dollops of glue to make sure they stayed connected to the cardboard. I tied a dark green ribbon behind one of the leaves and around the carboard, so I could hang it from a hook on my door. Not too bad for a $6 wreath.
White winter snowflakes
I have already made two Christmas-types wreaths, but I wanted a general "winter" wreath for after the holidays.
For this one, my cheap materials came from the Dollar Tree. I bought a 12 pack of simple foam snow flake shapes in white and silver sparkles. Then I got two packs of frilly snowflake ornaments with more sparkles.
Again, I cut out a thin annulus from cardboard (size was dictated by the size of the cardboard I had laying around). I arranged 8 of the foam snowflakes onto the cardboard with just a little space between them, trying to maximize coverage of the cardboard.
Hot glued those, then hot glued the frilly ornaments between them with lots of overlap. I took off the silver strings meant for hanging the ornaments, and used one of them for a loop to hang the wreath by. Because the whole thing was so light, and the strings were short, I simply hot glued the string to the back of the ring. A little of the cardboard still shows, but I didn't want the ring to be thinner and thus too flimsy. It works okay for me because it blends into the brown of my front door!
