
This post is part of my DIY Supply Purge Project. I realized that I was slowly being buried alive in DIY supplies that made me squeal but were never put to use. To fix that problem, I’ve made it my mission to use up all of my supplies before I buy any new ones—and to share some fun DIYs with you guys along the way.
Remember a year or so ago when I made that Halloween wreath with all of the googly eyes? Well that project sparked my daughter to proclaim that we should never buy another wreath again. Instead, the only thing worthy of our front door would be something made by me.
Can you feel the pressure? The girl is very opinionated and would have no problem scrunching her freckled nose and shaking her head to let me know my effort is sub par. Still, I bravely marched onward (or upward into my supply pit and then downward to the island in our kitchen where I toiled away with the weight of her pickiness sitting on my shoulders). Luckily, she loved it.
This project started out exactly how I wanted all of these purge projects to begin: with a bunch of supplies and no freaking clue what to do with them. I grabbed every single red, pink or heart bespeckled thing I could find. I also grabbed a coil of grapevine (because everyone has some of that lying unused in a drawer, no?).
It took me a little while, but I first decided that I definitely wanted to use some red tulle. It’s fluffy and feminine and I knew the girls would give it a thumbs up. I started tying it in little bows around the grapevine, which was cute but kind of blah. But then I had my AH HA! moment of bunching my bows together and everything fell into place.
Here’s what you need to create something similar:
My main ingredients were grapevine, red tulle, tissue paper, a piece of cardboard, scissors and my trusty hot glue gun.
I started off by cutting the grapevine down to the size I wanted and hot gluing the ends together. I should have realized that the wreath was thin and much dinkier than I wanted, but I didn’t and continued on my way.
You, my friend, should assess the dinkiness first. If you’re cool with a thin wreath, forge ahead. If not, layer it up. Once my wreath was complete, I ended up hot gluing a second layer in there to make it a bit meatier.
Next, I started cutting strips of tulle. Mine ended up being roughly four inches wide and 12 inches long, but experiment with it (note: I was only tying mine around one layer because I sucked at dinkiness assessment). The more you use, the fluffier it will look.
I’m very much into the whole asymmetrical thing—which is kind of perfect for hiding things that are less than perfect. So I just tied my strips into little bows (no need to get fancy, I just acted like I was tying a shoe over and over and over again) until I was happy.
Next, I decided the wreath needed a little heart to finish it off. I folded a piece of tissue paper in half, drew half a heart along the fold and cut it out to get a nice, even shape. I used my heart as a stencil on a piece of white cardboard and cut another one out, before using a glue stick to adhere the tissue paper to the cardboard. Now, gluing tissue paper can be tricky and if your wreath is going to be exposed to any wetness, it’s kind of dumb to use it. Scrapbook paper would probably work better. I just liked the pattern.
Once my heart was hot glued on, all that was left to do was to tie some tulle around the glued part of the vine to hide it and to give the wreath something to hang from.
Voila! A sweet wreath that at least gets two thumbs up from my girls. And honestly, their excitement is all that really matters.
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