Saturday, February 4, 2012

Valentine's Day Wreath

Commercials on tv are flooded with romantic movies and grocery stores are filled with flowers and heart-shaped chocolates. It’s obvious that love is the air and that means Valentine's day is near. I love this time of year, because it’s an extra excuse to have a romantic date and what girl doesn't love to get flowers. Plus with each passing holiday I have an additional reason to change the decorations in our house.

With each passing holiday and/or season I love to first decorate our front door. After all, that is the first thing people see and is a great way to invite people into your home. Plus, since I live in a townhome community every house looks very similar and it is my way of adding a personal touch.
So this wreath is very easy to make and probably took a grand total of 10 minutes and cost about $10-15 at hobby lobby. The key to any DIY craft project is buy supplies when they go on sale. I bought all the flowers and twigs at 50 percent off and the paint was 30% off.

HOW TO:
  1. I cut each of flower's stem so that it still would stick out a little ways when put into the wreath.
  2. I put all the flowers in place and moved them around until I thought that it looked perfectly.
  3. I cut all the feathers in pieces and the leaves off the (now) cut off stems.
  4. I hot glued each flower in place before adding any of the feathers or leaves. (You could also use wire, but I already had hot glue at my house). Then when I knew they were secured and the glue was dry
  5. I glued the leaves in place and then played around with the placement of the feathers and glued them in place.
  6. Because this does hang outside I made sure after everything was dry that if I tugged on them that they didn't move.
  7. I did buy 2 extra letters so that I could test how they would look with different colors of paint. I just used the cheap little bottles of acrylic paint. I am an indecisive person and needed to see it to decide. This is just what I do and it depends on your personality. Once I decided I painted the letters and got a nail file to smooth the edges. Let them completely dry.
  8. The tricky part is getting the wood letters to stick on the twigs of the wreath. There is probably an easier way than what I did but I marked the points on the letters where they were touching the most. I placed all the letters on how I wanted and then glued them in place. I did this mainly, because I wanted them to overlap in different spots.
  9. Then your ready to hang!