Until recently moving, I wasn't much of
a front-door decor person. Our house in Minneapolis faced a bunch of
rental properties which were not all very well-groomed, so
unfortunately I didn't take too much pride in our neighborhood or the
décor of the outside of our house. Granted we did try to have the
yard landscaped and kept up on the mowing, but I was not trying to
make it look very cozy and inviting from the outside. Our new house in Kansas City is in a neighborhood where everyone has large
front porches with tables, chairs, curtains, etc., and people take
very much pride to maintain the inviting appearance that was missing
in the last neighborhood we lived in.
So now I have become a front-door
decoration person. This fall I made a little flower assortment from
some fake flowers left from the prior owner of our Minneapolis house
and the fall ribbon from a gift basket provided to us by our realtor
when we moved. Total cost: the best kind, FREE!
For Christmas, I made an ornament
wreath using a wreath form, ornaments, and hot glue gun from a few
goodies I picked up from the Dollar Tree. Yes the store where
literally everything in there is $1. I think I spent about $8 on it?
Well worth it considering the ones at Joann's or Hobby Lobby are
normally like $30+ (so at 50-70% off which is their Christmas pricing
I guess it was about a wash) but I didn't want to wait until well
into December to put this up.
As I packed up all of my
Christmas décor the other day, I noticed how bare the front door seems.
It almost screamed at me “Cover Me” when I closed it. That
could be attributed to the door being a very bright yellow-mustard
color, but either way I knew what my first blog project would be: to
make a wreath of some sort. Now awhile ago I bought a bunch of
burlap for an unrelated project but remembered I had some left. I
know burlap is probably falling out of trend or whatever, but I love
the look of a burlap wreath and thought my shiny-burlap would be
nice. So instead of using trial and error (and my own craftiness) I
did what MOST normal, unskilled people do: go to Pinterest and find a
good tutorial for a burlap wreath. It actually took me awhile to
find one that didn't use a wire wreath form because I wanted to use
the extra wooden wreath form that I got from Dollar Tree (yes that $1
form) when I bought the things to make my Christmas wreath.
I finally settled on this tutorial:
But I had to tweak it since I couldn't
pin the burlap sections to my wreath form because the one I have
looks like this:
and not like this:
Also since my form is much smaller than
the one featured in the tutorial I used 3 x 3 inch squares instead of
4x4. After cutting everything I turned to my trusty glue gun and off
I went! Also one trick I read somewhere is that if you get the
little strings of glue all over, if you take a blow drying to them
they will shrink up and essentially disappear.
Here's what the wreath looked like halfway through:
And here's what it looked like when I finished:
Instead of hanging the wreath by a ribbon as done in the inspirational blog, I wanted to add some colorful felt
flowers that could be easily interchanged for the season. To create the flowers, I cut about 2-3 inch strip of felt the length of the felt square for each color, folded in half, and started cutting small strips most of the way down the folded side of the felt.
Once all the strips were cut the length of the felt, I rolled it up together starting at one end and glued together.
I attached a circular piece of felt to the bottom to make it easier to pin the flowers onto the wreath, then started pinning away using straight sewing pins. It probably would have been easier to glue them on, but I wanted to be able to easily take the flowers off the wreath to interchange them or if I want to hang the wreath with a ribbon sometime.
Once all flowers were arranged, up my wreath went. Sayonara naked front door!
So there you have it, my first burlap wreath. I am pretty excited about my wreath, and equally excited that I learned how to make easy felt flowers that could be used on anything from baby headbands, onesies, decorative pillows, etc. Until next week!
Rachel
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