DIY wreath

I'm a little behind on decorating this year, but I figured I'd post this anyway.  I saw this wreath on ediTORIal and fell in love.  The style I love (though it's not always reflected in this space) is centered around simple country/antique looks.  Anyways, I deviated from every pattern I used for this so hang on tightly.

I started with the things below.  I ended up switching out that white ribbon for some silver stuff that I had from aerie (you know how they tie the bags? finally found a use).  I added more tools but I'll talk about that in a minute.

18 inch straw wreath (much cheaper than foam) $4.99 Hobby Lobby
Natural Jute 135 ft. $3.99 Hobby Lobby
Hot glue gun & glue
scissors

This definitely isn't a quick project.  I didn't expect that it'd take less than an hour but it's quite time consuming to wrap that whole wreath with a tiny strand at a time.  Also, I'm sure it's easier to use a foam wreath since they are not bumpy like the bound straw is, but I save like $5 doing it this way, so I'm not complaining.

When I was finally done wrapping the wreath, I started with the bow.  I was going to use this tutorial from My Girl Thursday's blog because Elycia made a similar wreath and tested the look of a felt bow as well.  I quickly realized that while the felt bows are adorable, I didn't want to go buy felt (I only had purple, black, yellow and pink) and then I found my aerie ribbon stash so it all worked out.

I started the bow with this tutorial.  Everything went smoothly until I couldn't find any tiny wire.  I tried safety pins and failed miserably.  I ended up using a scrapbooking tool, the Crop A Dile, to punch a hole in the center and inserted a square-head fastener (kind of like these).  Although I really didn't want to hot glue the bow because I plan to make different ones and planned to switch them for seasons, I ended up having to.

I think it turned out okay anyways.

That's all for today.  I have 48 more hours before I'll be at work again so I'm going to get a bunch of other projects done and try to get rid of this sinus infection business.