Tuesday, September 13, 2011

A Fall Wreath

Forgive me in advance - I had a camera "mishap" - just prior to starting this project. So, unfortunately all I have right now are cell phone pictures, edited as best as I can get them, but I will try to get a pic of the finished wreath with the hubs' camera tonight to get up for you.

And now, on with the show....


What you need to make a fall flower wreath:

3ft of 1.5-2 inch pipe insulation
Duct tape / painters tape/ some type of thick tape
Yarn
3 flowers (or in my case 2)
feathers on a piece of wire (can be found in the floral department of most craft stores)
glue


I didn't take a picture of how I made the base of the wreath (see above), but I'm going to explain it as best I can.  I sent the man to Home Depot and I told him to get me some pipe insulation (mistake #1, sending the Man to Home Depot).  I didn't realise this was as big of a task as it was.  So eventually he comes back with a 6ft piece of pipe insulation that I would say is right about 1.5in in diameter (and cost under $1).  I cut this piece in half so I now had two 3ft sections.  Using one section, I wrapped it into a circle and secured the ends together with painters tape (what I had within reach when I realized the duct tape was no where to be found).  That's it.  You can see in the first 2 pictures how my seam looks.  It isn't pretty, but the whole thing is going to be covered with yarn in a bit, so who cares. 

So here is how the wreath started. I tacked the end of the yarn down with E6000 glue and then wrapped over it and just kept wrapping, tightly, but not too tight, until I made it all the way around.



Here's the wreath completely covered with yarn.



I added my feathers by trimming the wire holding them down and bending it and then just pushing it into the wreath.  The foam held it in place firmly, and I didn't feel like it needed to be glued, but I may glue it later.



Now to add the flowers.  I started by cutting down my flower stems to something a little more manageable, but still long enough to stick into my wreath if I needed to. The inside of the flower stems is wire, but I was hoping I was going to be able to just glue the flower itself to the wreath. I quickly learned flowers don't glue very well to the yarn I used.  Ok, plan #2.


Maybe, just maybe, it isn't the yarn, but the flower that isn't sticking to the glue.  So I put the plastic stem holder piece back on the flower and tried to glue that to the wreath (the yellow flower below).  That didn't work either, on to plan #3.


I finally ended up putting the stem back on the flower and cutting away all the plastic to expose the inside piece of wire so that I could stick the flower into the wreath with that. That seemed to work very well and the flower  (so far) has had no problem staying in place, even with multiple slams of the front door by the Peanut. I also opted to only use 2 flowers on my wreath due to their size, I just felt it looked better that way.  You can use as many as you want.



I also added a yarn loop to my wreath to hang it from. Our front door has a cute window at the top of it that doesn't allow for me to put a wreath hanger on the door (the molding makes it stick out horribly) so some sort of hanging loop on the wreath is the only way anything is going to hang on my door.




* I found that my wreath was initially a bit misshapen and I think my piece of insulation needed to be just a bit longer, however I wanted to be able to make two wreaths out of the one piece of insulation.  I remedied the odd shape by wrapping my yarn tight and was able to adjust the shape of the circle this way.  If you are going to use fabric to wrap this wreath I suggest cutting your insulation at about 3.5ft

***As a side note - I love my point and shoot camera, it's small, it's compact, and it takes descent pictures.  However I hate the fact that it runs off of rechargeable batteries and that I have to plug it in to the computer to charge it (which takes about 4 hours).  If anyone is in the market for a new camera, you may want to check that you can change the batteries manually if you don't have the patience time to wait for yours to charge.  I know it is more green to have a camera that recharges, but more often than not it dies at the most inconvenient times.  Just something to think about


I'm linking this post up at:






Pink Hippo Party

1 comment:

Kelsey said...

I love the colors you chose! I've been thinking about making a wreath this year..and the feathers are really pretty. Great job!

silverrosesewing.blogspot.com

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...