Felt Flower Wreath

Hi everyone! I'm checking in today with another project I completed not long ago. Some of you who know me in person might be aware of this already: my birthday is smack dab in the middle of "birthday season" - lots of other people close to me have birthdays within just a few days of mine. So, while I always look forward to celebrating my birthday by taking it easy, I'm also usually engaged in some madness getting ready for all of the other birthdays in my circle. This year, I decided to make a gift for my closest co-worker, whose birthday is just two days before mine.

I knew I wanted to make a wreath.

There's a place in her office where she attached a command hook to hold a wreath at Christmas time. When that season ended, I attempted to remove the hook, but it seemed stubbornly stuck on (there's this gnarly textured wallpaper behind it - ick). Rather than risking damage to the wall, we decided to leave the hook in place. I knew it would be the perfect spot to display a wreath year round, so I was quickly set on that as my project idea.

I wasn't keen on using faux flowers, so I did some googling to see what my choices were. It didn't take long for me to settle on making rosettes out of felt.

 Alright, twelve sheets of felt later, I was in business. The total cost in supplies for this project was definitely less than $10, as the wreath above wasn't even $5 (though I think it was on sale, or I might have used a coupon).

And here's my first rosette! My online research turned up lots of blog posts with instructions for how to make these flowers - I won't bore you with another one. Basically, you cut the felt into a spiral and then roll it back up. What I can tell you is this: you might see instructions encouraging you to trace a spiral onto your felt, or at least, cut out a circle before free handing your spiral. I didn't do either. I cut each felt sheet into squares and then cut the spiral just using my eyes and a pair of fabric scissors.

I was pretty pleased with the result. There are a couple of these that I made by zig-zagging within the spiral - a tip I read about somewhere. I wasn't actually all that happy with their appearance, though they provided a bit of a contrasting texture.

So, I just kept on going! The only minor casualty was a burn from my hot glue gun. We'll call that beginner's misfortune, as this was my first big project with the glue gun.

The next step was to glue the rosettes onto the wreath, which was really quite fun!

Ta-da! The final product. When I originally imagined this project, I was thinking I was going to scatter the flowers all over the wreath, with only a few clumped together in the lower left corner. But, as I was putting the clump together, it didn't look quite full enough, until it began to look like this. I think this is a little more mod than I had originally planned, but I was happy and so was the birthday girl!