Daisy Welcome Wreath

As soon as I saw this wreath on Pinterest, I knew I needed to make my own version.  I would be barefoot all the time if I could (darn winter!) and daisies were my mom's favorite flowers.

I wanted to make mine a bit bigger, so bought a 12" wreath form and also used fake flowers instead of daisy trim.  I'm also still mildly obsessed with buntings, so I wanted to put the wording on one instead of the flag.  It took about a skein and a half of Fun Fur, and much more time that was necessary to wrap the wreath, since I'm way too picky about ridiculous things that make no difference to the end result.

Then I had the seemingly brilliant idea of sticking the flower heads onto sewing pins, so I could reposition them easily.

Several flowers ended up falling off the pins as I worked with it, so I went back and hot glued the flowers to the pins, which worked well.  I didn't want to totally commit by gluing the flowers right to the wreath, so this was a good solution.

Then I printed off this bunting.  My original plan was to stamp the letters on with one of the alphabet sets from my stamping and scrapping days, but all my sets were either too small or too big, so I had to suck it up and write them on with a Sharpie.  This was a bit nerve-wracking, as I have the world's worst handwriting.  I taped the flags onto some embroidery floss and tied it to pins to attach to the wreath.  At that point, I realized that the bunting was much too big to fit all of "Bare Feet Welcome" on it without looking crazy busy.  I was bummed, since that was one of my favorite things about the original!  I was not about to start over and have to redraw all those letters, not to mention cut out the flags again, so I decided to simplify it to just say "Welcome." 

Despite that minor disappointment, it's pretty fun for a spring/summer wreath.  I think my mom would have liked it.

Yarn Ball & Ornament Wreath

I spent some quality time with my glue gun over the weekend, officially becoming the last person on the planet to jump on the yarn ball and ornament wreath bandwagon.  I actually bought all the supplies last December, but didn't get to it, so the bag of stuff has been stashed  in my craft room for the last year, taunting me with its unfinishedness. 

My camera's not loving the red, I guess.

It took waaaaaaaaaaaaay longer than I thought, probably because I overthought the placement of every single ball of yarn and ornament.  It looks a lot better in person, really popping against our green door.  The lighter red yarn has a red strand of tinsel or something running through it that adds another dimension. I don't know why it photographed so badly.  The photographer is probably at fault...

A few hours after it was finished, I ran my hand through my hair and said to the husband, "Wow, my hair is really snarly today.  Did I forget to comb it?"  That actually happens to me;  my hair is *so* straight that you can't even tell.  Then I found some big gobs of hot glue in the ends.  LOL  Next time I'll make sure I have my usual ponytail in before breaking out the glue gun.

Balloon Wreath

When I saw this Celebration Balloon Wreath tute, I thought it was pretty much the cutest thing ever, and perfect for O's birthday.

This project was not, however, as quick and easy as I was led to believe.  I think my balloons must've been much smaller than she used, because I had to put them a lot closer together and even though my wreath was the same size, after I finished up my three bags of 100 balloons, I was only a bit past halfway done. There were only two bags left at the nearest Hobby Lobby, and one of those bags had a handful of oddly shaped ones that I couldn't use, so I ran out before making it all the way around.  I wrapped it with ribbon to hang and called it good.  I may go back and add more later, but not until after my fingers heal! My tips of my thumb and index finger are pretty sore from pushing in nearly 500 floral pins. (BTW, the giant bag of pins shown in the tutorial is $4.99 at Hobby Lobby and I have tons left over.  My JoAnn's only had packs of 25 for $2 or thereabouts.) 

Liebster Blog Award & Yarn Heart Wreath

A big thank you to my friend Leigh of Sleepytime Sewing, who tagged me with the Liebster Blog Award.  The Liebster is intended to recognize smaller blogs (with fewer than 300 followers) and get the word out about blogs you otherwise may never have heard of, but are worth checking out.  Part of the award is getting to nominate 3-5 other blogs.  Hopefully they don't all need to be crafty, because mine are:


A pie a week...  Follow the adventures of Simple Simon, an unnamed member of my family, in his quest to to bake 52 different pies.  He's nearing the end, with 47 pies to date.


My awesome Auntie M's Photo Journal of a Woman of Age.  Her tagline is "Random Acts of Photography & Musing", which sums it up well.


and


The Fishsticks & Fries blog.  I'm sure you've all noticed my obsession with Bonnie's Patrick Curved Raglan pattern, and the Emmy follows close behind.


Google tells me that liebster is the German word for dearest or sweetheart, which is a nice segue (which, btw, I totally thought was spelled segueway!  I had no idea that's how it was pronounced) into my project for this post, a yarn-wrapped heart wreath.


Our front door was looking a little sad after taking down the Christmas wreath, so I started scouring blogland for Valentine's Day wreath ideas.  I saw a lot I liked, but none that I had all the materials for on hand.  And really, I don't *need* a V-Day wreath and I have a basement full of craft supplies.  Then I stumbled across this and knew I'd found the one if I made it on a bigger scale.  I found a big box and two shades of burgundy acrylic yarn that were from my pre-yarn-snob days.  Cut out a giant heart and started wrapping with the darker burgundy as we watched our family movie on Saturday night.  I nearly finished, but ran into problems getting the yarn to stay put on the pointier part of the heart -- you can see in the original link that theirs has a shallower point on the top of the heart.  I put it aside for a couple of days, trying to figure out how to salvage it, when I realized that glue guns solve all crafting problems.  Once again, hot glue saved the day! 

That door knocker needs to go.

I like how using two colors of yarn add some dimension to an otherwise simple wreath.  I don't love it, but it gets the job done.  :)


In other news,  I finally sewed again this week, after being a bit burnt out from Christmas.  It's a gift, so I'll post pictures once it reaches its intended recipient.

Monster Wreath

As soon as I saw Leigh's awesome monster wreath, I knew my five-year-old and I had to make one.  We spent a lot of time looking through this thread on Craftster, and O. wanted to to make one with "ALL the details" shown on the various wreaths.  Since I didn't want to spend our *entire* weekend on it, I managed to talk him down to eyes, horns and teeth, with the promise that we may add glasses sometime this week.  We bought some ping pong balls and Sharpies, dug some furry fabric from the stash, warmed up the hot glue gun and got to work.  I think he turned out pretty cute -- er, scary!

If we were to make another one -- and O. claims we shall be making a new one every Halloween -- I'd probably just sew it rather than hot glue it.  The edges look lumpy and it took longer than sewing anyway.  Furrier fabric would probably hide that too.  Or I could just pretend it's on purpose...