Red Door Abode: Spring Wreath

Waking up to 8 inches of fresh snow this morning was anything but a pick me up. So as I sit here staring at my already blooming, pot bound daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, I am going to take a deep breath and remind myself to be patient. Good things come to those that wait, right? I am going to send positive thoughts into the atmosphere so that I can be planting and gardening and chasing lil' legs in the yard in no time.

In the meantime, to give myself a dose of spring-y love, I made a new wreath for our front door. My focus was to use up some of the materials that I had leftover from other projects. I started cruisin' for some inspiration and saw this wreath over at Jones Design Company.

I always have burlap in my workshop so I fired up the glue gun and started pulling out leftovers. I had some beautiful French Country Kravet fabric, twigs and ribbon. I began by wrapping 3 inch width strips of burlap around the entire wreath form.

Wreath from the Dollah Store.

Once I had the entire wreath covered, I started pulling and manipulating the burlap to see what I might like. I really like the idea of burlap ruffles, but there was no way I was breaking out the sewing machine. I started experimenting with pulling a thread of burlap and cinching up the fabric around it. AND...it worked! Make sure to pull a thread about 4 or more threads up though so that it doesn't unravel on you!

Pulling a horizontal thread and cinching across the burlap.

Once I got the burlap ruffled, I used some hot glue and wrapped the ruffle around the wreath form. I used wooden skewers to press the burlap down to prevent burning my fingers!!

I repeated this step for 4 ruffles and continued down the side of the wreath. Again, I took a step back and realized that I really liked the way it looked with just a few ruffles on one side.

Next, I started experimenting with my fabric to see if I could make some fabric flowers. I had never done this before so I started scrunching and folding the fabric to make a flower form. Nothing seemed to work visually for me. Then I realized that I would just cut out "petals" and layer them on top of each other, almost like a dahlia or zinnia.


Cute fabric? Check!

I cut varying width strips of my fabric and then folded them accordion style so I was left with this.

Using my larger scissors, I cut out my petals by cutting the figure of an "8". So it was actually two petals that were connected in the middle (muck like the propeller of an airplane)

Bad pictchah....sorry!

I cut a length of floral wire and started sliding the petals onto the wire through the middle part of the fabric cut out. Start with your smaller pieces and build up to larger ones to create a blossoming flower effect.

When this was complete, I twirled the end of the wire that was sticking out of the center (like a wine bottle opener). This little spring in the middle of the flower looked pretty cute so on some of my flowers I left it. On the other ones, I just took a small strip of fabric, curled it over itself so it formed a little roll, then glued it onto the center.

Now I started arranging the flowers on my wreath and used the extra floral wire to wrap around the wreath. I put in a few drops off hot glue behind certain petals to make sure they didn't move.