Tutorial: Fun Fall Wreath

As I promised, here is a tutorial for the craft I completed last night! I decided that since we are finally buying a house and that soon-to-be hubby will be moving in during September/October, a fall wreath would make a perfect DIY to decorate our new front door. ( I apologize now for the really crappy pictures. I was using my phone to take some of these and had pretty bad lighting.)

Materials:

• A plain crafting wreath (mine is a 18" grapevine wreath from Jo-Ann, $4.99)
• Autumn color fake leaves
• Fun decorative items and picks (like my pumpkin pick, yellow flower clip and maze pick)
• Ribbon (mine is 1 1/2 inch thick brown ribbon)
• Wooden initial letter (not pictured)
• Hot glue gun/glue sticks (also not pictured) or floral wire if you prefer

Instructions:

Start with a basic idea of what you want your wreath to look like. Start gluing down your leaves. Make sure to insert any picks into the wreath about where you want them. Glue leaves around the picks to fill in the space. I haphazardly started gluing the leaves down, making sure they wouldn't fall off while making sure my decorations were where I wanted them. Here a picture of mine part way through (again, I apologize for the bad quality)

Keep gluing until your wreath is covered and you are happy with the results. Complete the look by adding your wooden initial to the wreath using ribbon, leaving the ribbon long enough so that the letter dangles a little. You can tie it in a bow and use a wreath hanger to hang on the door or use this little trick and use the ribbon to hang the wreath. Ta-da!

***If you choose to use the ribbon to hang the wreath, make sure to leave enough extra length and if you're adding the wooden letter and hanging with ribbon, the letter will end up touching the top of the wreath.

That's it. Pretty easy. This probably took me about 3 or so hours, but I was also eating and watching Bridesmaids, so I got distracted. A lot. Bridesmaids was probably a bad choice of movie to use as background noise since I ended up watching the movie half the time. But who could help it? That movie is HILARIOUS. Thank you, Kristen Wiig, for that masterpiece.