DIY Valentine’s Day Wreath Tutorial

Every year, I try to make a new Valentine’s Day Craft or two that will stand the test of time, decorating styles, as well as my patience and space for storing it. I’ve been lacking in the wreath department for our February holiday. While wandering through the store aisles of everything Christmas back in early December, I saw pink and fuchsia bulb ornaments that inspired this project.

Using a simple foam wreath form, extremely inexpensive Christmas ornaments (love those 80% off after-the-Big-Day sales!), a glue gun, and some tulle, I made a fun, eye-catching wreath to get us out of the January doldrums and into the spirit of Valentine’s Day.

Here are the “raw materials”:

1. To start, cover your work surface. There’s nothing quite like the buzz kill of cleaning up a huge mess to take the shine off a crafty accomplishment!

2. I placed all the ornaments I was going to use in my work area, and then roughly laid the bulbs around the wreath in the order I thought would work. This isn’t about perfection, but you don’t want to get two-thirds of the way through gluing everything only to find out you need more of something! (Or so I’m told… this, of course, has *never* happened to me!)

3. Pull out each ornaments’ hanger – you won’t need them.

4. Apply a liberal amount of hot glue to each ornament, and stick each to the wreath form. I started with five, and spaced them out roughly, like this:

A few notes to help make this part of the process go well:

• You almost cannot use too much glue.
• You might have to hold the ornament in place for a few seconds, so nothing slips out of place.
• Glue drips do happen, so if you aren’t using parchment paper, be sure to have something else that can potentially handle a few glue globs.

5. Start filling in your first layer of ornaments, as you had laid them out in your rough plan earlier. Your first round should look something like this.

Don’t worry about perfect spacing; first of all, this is your ART, not some factory-churned-out, carefully measured perfection, and secondly, the tulle you’re about to utilize functions as something of an equalizer.

6. Dot a few globs of glue around the green part of the wreath, and loosely place a layer of tulle over the glue.

7. Start gluing your second layer of ornaments. Your work-in-progress will look something like this:

8. After you finish this second round of ornaments, pull out the tulle again. With the goals of hiding the green foam and creating a soft but dimensional look, I roughly wove a layer of tulle around each ornament, like this:

As I moved along, I placed a generous glob of glue between each ornament, to help hold the tulle in place.

9. You may finish the step above and be happy with your results. My efforts seemed just a bit off, still, so I rifled through the smallest sized bulb ornaments and placed those toward the inside of the wreath, as you see here:

10. After all your glue is dry, add a loop of fishing line or a metal hook on the back to hang your masterpiece.

And that’s all there is to it! We’ve now got a nice, inexpensive but fun Valentine’s Day decoration that we’ll use for years to come.

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Crafting Guest Post provided by:
Melissa Lasko is a mom of 3 girls and a freelance writer. To keep life interesting, she crafts, cooks, and studies the Urban Dictionary, and single-handedly keeps her local Starbucks in business. Mel’s 2014 New Year’s resolutions include finally putting her three dressers-full of unused art supplies to good use. To read the basis for her upcoming Previvor memoir, check out her blog post entitled “Boobs and Consequences.”

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