My Thursday night....

Since I am on this crafty kick, I decided I may as well start making gifts for birthdays etc.  It would save me money and I would fulfill my crafting urges.  While cruising around Pinterest, I saw a bunch of yarn wrapped wreaths.  They looked simple enough and around my level, so I kept it in mind.  While discussing all the birthday gifts we needed with my hubby, we came to his Mom, whose birthday was at the beginning of March.  I remembered that she always has a wreath on her door whenever we visit.  I proposed this idea to Mike and he agreed it would be a great gift.  So it was decided.

I headed out to Michaels and bought everything I needed.  This included a 14" green Styrofoam wreath, multicoloured yarn, ribbon and a single silk flower bunch.  The most expensive part was the flowers, but since I am still not willing to try making my own, I went with the store bought variety.  In total for everything it came to just around 20.00 dollars.

I started out by making a knot at the end of the yarn and pinning it to the wreath on the side that I wanted to be the back.  I actually didn't have any pins, but I found that a very small nail will do the trick as well.  Then I started wrapping the wreath with the yarn.  I made sure to keep the strands very tight together and occasionally had to push them with my nails just to make sure there were no gaps.  A few gaps did happen, but since I went with a green Styrofoam wreath instead of a white and a greenish yarn, you can't really tell.  This was the relatively simple part, but very time consuming.  Make sure you have a movie or some good TV in the background.  For me to cover the 14" wreath, it took 2 hours.  Once the wreath was completely wrapped I cut the yarn off and used my glue gun to seal the end.  Don't worry about the glue glob as you can cover it up.

Next came the embellishments.  I clipped the two stems of flowers off the bunch I had bought and positioned them the way I liked on the wreath.  I then took the hot glue gun and added a dollop of glue on the base of the stems and roughly around the middle and pressed them onto the wreath.  The glue gun was very stringy, but I found if I wiped it right next to where I was gluing (so that it would be concealed) it eliminated that problem.  I then took some of the leaves from the stem and arranged them to cover up where I had the two flowers meeting.  Once again I hot glue gunned all this together.  Once it was all done, I realized it was missing something on the leaves.  it just looked naked.  So I took some of the ribbon I would be using for the hanger and created a bow and hot glue gunned that to where I wanted.  It came out looking great!

After all this was done, it was time for the ribbon hanger.  This was actually the toughest part of the project and I still think it hangs a little wonky, but after looking at some online I saw that some of those hanged wonky too.  So I didn't feel too bad about it!  I took a long piece of the ribbon and placed it where I wanted on the wreath over the glue spot from the yarn.  I glued the back of it to the wreath and left the front open.  Once it dried it was obvious that wasn't going to work.  So I ended up gluing the ribbon all the way around the wreath.  It seems like it will stay, but as I said, it is a bit off center so may hang a little off as well.

All in all I am really happy with the results.  I loved the yarn I chose since the colours changed with no effort from me!