Easy Wreath Tutorial

I bought a wreath at Michael's several months ago with no real specific purpose in mind. It was on clearance and I am a sucker. I also bought a can of silver spray paint, also on clearance. At the time, these two items were unrelated.

The aforementioned wreath.

Until today.

Boom.

You will need:

A twiggy wreath

Spray paint

Felt or other fabric

Needle and thread or glue

Hot glue gun and glue

Spray paint is known to cause birth defects in California. Thank goodness I live in Wisconsin so I don't have to worry about that. But, you should probably spray paint your wreath outside, or at least not on your hardwood floors (don't worry, it came off. mostly).

Now we're going to make some festive felt flowers to attach to the wreath. This is a little difficult to explain, but I'll do my best. Because that's really all I can do.

Fold a length of felt in half. This piece was 12 inches long and about 2.5 inches deep.

Fold the end in on itself a small amount. Make a little wad out of the felt. It doesn't matter too much what it looks like.

You then flip and twist the long end of the felt around the small inner part. I realize that is incredibly vague. You are wrapping the long tail end of the felt around the base, and twisting it at the same time. In your head you will be saying (or at least I do), "Flip, twist, flip, twist." It is not a science, but the more you do it, the better you will get at it.

When you are finished, you will have a fabulous little flower like this. Secure your flowers by sewing up through the bottom of the flower and back down in a crevice or very close to the original spot you brought your needle up in. Alternately, you could secure with glue as you make the flower.

Repeat until you have as many flowers as you want. Use different colors for variety and different widths of felt in order to achieve different sized flowers.

I made five because I wanted an odd number (OCD will not allow an even amount of flowers) and three wasn't cutting it, yet seven was too many.

I made some red ones to add to the festiveness of the wreath. And because I ran out of the off-white.

In hindsight, it probably could have handled seven flowers.

Hot glue gun those flowers to your wreath and you're done. It took me like 20 minutes to do this whole thing. Not including the time that it took to look for the hot glue gun and curse my husband for hiding the glue gun IN THE GLUE GUN BOX. Seriously, who does that?

Felt Garland Tutorial

Felt is hot. I mean, not physically hot, but it's everywhere in the DIY world. I guess if you lit it on fire it would be hot. It probably burns really well. But that's neither here nor there.

Here's my take on a felt garland. I used holiday colors, but you could totally do it with nursery colors or a birthday theme. Whatevs. This project was really easy. You could even do it without sewing if you have a hot glue gun or some craft glue. Hell, even Elmers would probably work.

You need:

• felt (two sheets of each color. I used red, while, and green)
• two circles to trace (I used one 2.5 inch in diameter, and one 2 inch in diameter)
• scissors
• about a foot of ribbon if you're sewing your garland, about six feet if you're gluing
• various sewing tools (or glue)

Here's my circles.

Trace your circles on the felt. You'll need twelve of each color, each size (so that's 24 of each color, got it?). I found that twelve of the large circle fit on one sheet of felt, whereas I only needed half a sheet for the smaller circles. Cut those bad boys out.

Once you have them all cut out, lay the larger circles out in a line. Do it in a manner that pleases you. I went in a pattern, red, white, green because I knew it would tickle my OCD bone if two of the same color touched, but if that doesn't bug you, go nuts. Then, lay the smaller circles on top of the larger, again in a manner pleasing to your aesthetic.

I ended up with a lovely long line of circles.

Then stack them up in order. Like this:

This kind of makes me want pizza.

I then chain sewed the circles together. Like this:

I've got the smaller circle on top of the larger and I'm just sewing them together.
When I get to the end of one set of circles, I just grab another off my stack
and sew it on creating a chain.

When you have all your circles sewn into a chain, sew your ribbon to the end.

If you didn't want to sew this, you could glue each smaller circle onto a larger circle and then glue that circle sandwich to a longer strand of ribbon. Same basic principle.

Then hang them up and revel in your awesomeness.

Hoooo loves you baby?

The boys have decided to be cheap-o Wal-Mart costumes this year, and there seems to be very little that I can do to change their minds. Thing 3 is still little enough that I can subject my will on her whenever I choose. Therefore, she will be an owl.

I made this quickie costume out of a freebie white onesie and some felt "feathers" that Thing 1 helped me cut out. Thing 2 helped me pin them on (note to self: stick pins and two-year-olds aren't the best combo), and I sewed it up while everyone was sleeping. The wings and hat/mask are just free styled. I think it's pretty darn adorable.

Hoo! Hoo!

Oh, crap.

So, this is the third time I'm attempting to add this post. The first time I got got pooped on. After cleaning that mess up, I tried again, but was thwarted by a blogger error. Let's see how we progress.

I've decided I need to spruce up the baby's room, so I started with some felt letters that I came across last week. Of course, I can't find the original post now, but I'm fairly certain I got them from here.

Hmmm...looks like I need to get my manfriend to hang that a little bit straighter.

And because they're never far behind...