Christmas Wreath

I first saw an idea for this on Ali Edwards' blog, in which she linked Elise Blaha. I thought it was such a neat wreath and right away my mind was churning away on ideas of making my own. I'm in a festive mood this year, and I'm turning into the "arts & crafts" woman. It's been so much fun!


The fabric is Amy Butler designs, which I ended up ordering from ebay. Since Amy doesn't have Christmas fabric (not that I know of--link me if I'm wrong), so I picked fabric colors that were close to "green" and "red". Who made those the traditional Christmas colors anyway? Ha!

This is what I did for the wreath project.

1. Ordered fabric.

2. Made my leaf shape template which I traced 24-25 times on cardboard; cut out leaves.

3. Cut out fabric pieces. Most of these were arranged so certain shapes and colors would be on the leaf. I cut the fabric about a 1/2-inch away from the leaf.

4. Adhered fabric to cardboard. This was tricky. My first thought was to use Zip Dry, but that doesn't work well for fabric, so I ended up using the Scotch adhesive gun. A hot glue gun would probably work best.

5. It wasn't in my initial plan, but I used my sewing machine and sewed around the entire leaf. (Which I'm so glad I did!) After awhile I realized that the needle was collecting glue from the adhesive. (I'm imagining those looks of, "I can't believe you are gunking up your needle!" Ha!) So after awhile I didn't adhere on the sides of the leaf and just sewed slower.

***It's all trial and error, right?***

6. Slept (that was a lot of work!).

7. Spread out the leaves in the wreath pattern. I laid 6-7 leaves in a circle pattern, leaving enough room in the middle for an open space. Then I layered leaves on top of that. I ended up with 5 extra leaves.

8. Glued with hot glue gun (which I bought an hour before).

9. Glued on buttons.

10. Drilled (yes, drilled!!) a hole in the top of one of the leaves and put ribbon through.

This project was SO much fun and I'm super excited about it!! My first thought was to use this as a Christmas card holder, but it's not big enough so I will leave it as is. Now I'm looking for a card holder idea. I found one here today...I just might try it.