I have this moral dilemma purchasing wreaths. They are all like $50 and never exactly what I want. So what ends up happening is I don't buy one and I don't make one and I have to rely on my mother/mother-in-law to coincidentally gift me one.
Not this year, my friends. This year I found a DIY wreath to make and oh how I'm going to make it. Only cost me about $18 for the felt and pool noodle. You also need crazy glue/a hot glue gun and duct tape. So overall it was about half the price of a store bought one...plus about 6 hours of labour.
Start by cutting the pool noodle to your desired size and then tape it aggressively into a circle. You can also get an actual wreath base but I was trying to do this as cheaply as possible.
I had to cut all my felt into these squares but you can probably purchase felt already in an appropriate size. Approximately 4in by 4in.
Then all of the squares need to be cut into circles.
And then into a spiral leaving a hole at the centre.
Once that is done (4 hours and a sore hand later) all you have to do is roll from the outside in and it creates these adorable rosettes.
Two hours later you are surrounded by rosettes. I love the colours. I initially wanted to do white, lavender and purple but alas Walmart only had these colous. I actually really like how bright and cheerful it is all multicoloured.
I may have needed a mimosa or two to get through this project but it was so much fun.
Once all your millions of rosettes are done (I needed somewhere between 130 and 150) you can hot glue them to the noodle in any design or pattern you want.
Learn from my error moment: I hot glued straight onto the pool noodle.....which obviously melted the plastic immediately. Next time I will wrap the whole thing in duct tape to avoid that. I managed to make it work by applying the hot glue to the rosettes and then waiting a few seconds to let the glue cool a bit before putting it on.
The finished product! I love it!
I filled in any small areas that you could see the pool noodle with a little piece of felt that matched a nearby rosette.
Overall it was really easy, took a really long time but it was not complicated AT ALL. I managed to commision Will to do a bunch of the rosette rolling so that sped things up a little.
It would be cool to do a black and orange one at Halloween. Maybe with some spiders or eyeballs on it. Red, green and white for Christmas with sparkles and bells. I've seen a couple other techniques to make different looking felt flowers and if I try that out I'll let you guys know!
