Angela's Sweet Summer Wreath

Alas, I’ve been trolling the craft store again.  This time, I ended up in the floral department, which is an area through which I rarely venture.  Although I find the artificial flowers there beautiful, the price tags tends to turn me off, and I always feel like I could MAKE something that would leave me feeling much more satisfied.  As I turned to leave, however, I came across a styrofoam flat circle – the kind you use to make floral wreaths with.  My crafty muse immediately kicked me in the posterior with her glittery boot, so I bought the wreath and high-tailed it back to my craft room.

First, I wrapped the styrofoam wreath in paper strips cut from magazine pages included in many of the Gauche Alchemy kits, including the Wholey Sheet kit.  I used Mod Podge to do kind of a Papier-mâché treatment, to ensure that I’d have a good solid base to work on.  Once it was dry enough, I painted it (sloppily) with white Gesso paint.  Sloppily mainly because I wanted some of the magazine page design to show through, but also because that’s just how I roll.

While the wreath base was drying, I spent around a half hour punching paper flowers out of the rest of my stack of magazine pages.   It was kind of therapeutic actually.  Punch, slide, punch, slide…  After I had a nice stack of pretty paper posies, I went to tinting them with Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist in lovely summer colors.  By the time my little paper flowers were dry, so was the wreath, and so I went to work assembling.

I used ball-end stick pens to secure all my flowers to the wreath.  Some of the flowers I layered, some of them I didn’t.  I pushed the pins in at an angle so they wouldn’t stick through the back.  I quickly noticed that as the flowers continued to dry, they curled up a bit, which was perfect!  When I had all the flowers pinned where I wanted them, I added a felt butterfly that I cut by hand, secured with a large hat pin.  I then added some crocheted lace trim from my Mixed Media Color Kit to the top via two stick-pins on the back of the wreath (tip: place the pins pointing UPWARDS so they don’t yank out after you hang your wreath!)

Here’s the finished project, including some detailed pics so you can see, well… the details!  :)

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