A Spring Wreath (and a video!)

A quick note about this post: Apologies in advance for the lack of “finished and hanging on the front door” photos! Our front door happens to have our house number right where the wreath hangs (it actually frames the number nicely 🙂 ), so for this reason, it’s tricky to get a finished shot of the project hanging up without compromising the privacy of not sharing where we live on the internet. We did our best, but if you’re wondering where all of the “afters” are, well that’s the story. 

Now that spring is almost over… I’m finally posting about the wreath that has been hanging on our front door for- oh wait- the whole season. Whoops. 🙂 Well, better late than never. And really, although this wreath is spring-y, it can totally transition into the summer months too. We’ll probably take advantage of that and leave it up for at least another month or so!Anyway, onto the project itself. I was inspired to do something with the neutral colors so that any future colored blossoms we plant around the front door will take center stage. I also wanted to use the shape a flower in the design to play off of the real blooms that would join the front porch display down the road. Here’s the one from my Pinterest board that I used for inspiration:

To make ours, I used a wreath “mold” (is that the right word?) that I scooped up at a thrift store. I always see similar (and admittedly, prettier) ones in craft stores, but could never bring myself to spend money on them. When I found one for less than a dollar (!!!) at the thrift store, I figured I’d give it a go:

Apart from the wreath, I used some burlap scraps, lace, a wooden letter (optional- I got ours from Michaels), scissors, a hot glue gun, and twist ties. I didn’t have the how-to in front of me, so apart from my inspiration picture, I was really just making it up as I went along and hoping that we’d end up with something presentable at the end. Right away, I realized that the flowers-on-only-half-of-the-wreath look was not going to work because of the extensive tying job that was holding the sticks together. Undoing any of the ties was out of the question because everything would burst, should the strings be snipped off. 

A full ring of flowers it is, then! The flower making (aka. the fun part) took a bit of trial and error, but eventually, I came up with a method that seemed to work. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to do this- and probably far more professional then my process- but in the end, I was happy with the way they turned out. Rather than me trying to publish a novel on the tutorial, I figured a video would be waaaay more fun. So, here goes nothin’: consider this your “how-to” on making burlap/lace flowers.

Some (obligatory) notes about the video:

• The beginning is hilariously awkward. Don’t worry- we were laughing watching the whole first half too…
• This was not a “one shot wonder” folks, so if I’m stumbling over words and phrases, it’s because we kept ruining each take with hoots of laughter and had to start over. And over. And over. Quality control toward the end was not high on the priority list…
• After watching through, please rewind to 0:41ish… while we were watching it through, Mitch asked, “Wait, was that me sniffling in the background?” Sniffling is a delicate term for what goes down around the 0:43 mark. After hearing it once, we couldn’t help but rewind and rewind and rewind… I was crying from laughing so hard.
• Finally, I keep saying “we” (ex. 2:21), like Mitch was actually making lace flowers with me. HAH! There’s no way he would ever agree to that.

And now that you’ve sat through (or skipped) that, here’s a quick step-by-step breakdown:

Step 1: Cut burlap (2-3″ x 24″ for bigger flowers, 2-3″ x 12″ for smaller flowers).

Step 2: Fold strip in half. Roll one end a few times and add a dot of glue to secure.

Step 3: Twist and wrap, baby. Dot of glue every so often to secure.

Step 4: Finish off with… you guessed it- a dot of glue.

Step 5: Pull or trim off any extra strings.

And there you have it- a burlap (or lace) flower:

Once I had a stock pile of flowers in different sizes, I began arranging them around the wreath until I had a pattern that I liked. Again, because of the copious amounts of black string holding the wreath together, the flowers had to go around the entire circle in an effort to conceal.

After  settling on the arrangement, I went to work slipping a twist tie through the bottom of each flower and tying it around the wreath. I did this until all of the flowers had been secured and then went back to add a dot of glue between each one to adhere them to each other and prevent them from sliding all over the place.

Okay, it’s letter time! The “T” I got from Michaels came in white and I debated painting it (I really liked the look of the lime green in my Pinterest inspiration), but decided to live with it in white for now… maybe it’ll get a coat of color someday. For now, the white works for us! To secure the letter, I used a bit of twine, looped it over the top of the wreath, tied a few knots, and glued it to the back of the letter with the hot glue gun.

I also debated adding some lime green ribbon in the form of a bow somewhere, but in the end, opted for the natural look. Eventually, we’ll fill the empty, flower-less pot next to the door with something living and colorful. When that happens, it’ll be nice to have a wreath that fades into the background a bit, letting the plants have center stage. But enough chatter, here’s the finished product hanging in all its burlap and twist tie glory.

So this begs the question: What’s hangin’ on your door? Send us some pictures… it’ll be a party. 🙂 See ya tomorrow!

-Leslie