copycraft | modern felt wreath diy

Well friends, the fall wreath debacle has finally come to a peaceful end. What debacle, you ask? Only the greatest crafting conundrum to plague our family in recent history.

For literally the past YEAR I've been trying to convince Jason that we need a fall wreath on our front door. Since the dawn of Pinterest, I have seen the most adorable fall decorations and all I've wanted to do is participate in the seasonal fun. However, there's simply no sense in making a wreath if your Craft Scrooge of a boyfriend is going to gripe about how girly your front door looks every time we enter our home.

You see, apparently wreaths are for girls. Um... duh, they're for girls. Just like candles and knick-knacks and sachets but those things have never seemed to personally offend him. (For the record, I don't own/use sachets, I just think it's a fun word to write/say. Sometimes I just like to say "sachet" while I sashay around the house. See what I did there?)

Anyway, Jas had this perception of all wreaths being branches and silk flowers and ribbons and bows. I assured him that there was such a thing as a modern wreath, but nothing I showed him seemed to do the trick. He didn't even like the yarn wreaths I optimistically offered him, which I think do have a modern feel sometimes, but unfortunately the yarn thing just screamed Greatgrama's knitted sweater to him.

So the entire fall season passed us by last year, and our poor front door remained naked. Unfestive, unloved. (ps. unfestive is not a word, in case you were wondering. But it works, right? You guys know what I mean.) October finally rolled around this year and I told Jas I refused to put our poor door through yet another season of neglect. So the deal was... I'll go shop around at Michael's, come up with something, and if you hate it, I'll just put it up on the blog and give it as a gift to a friend or something. Deal? Deal.

Now this is the point where I wander the aisles of Michael's while simultaneously Google image searching or Pinterest searching "modern fall wreath" a bajillion times on my iPhone. (Not an easy thing to do when you're as clumsy as I am, by the way. Walking and doing anything on my phone has never yielded great results.) I swear, they should have a "Pinterest station" set up at craft stores where they just have a few laptops with the home page defaulting to Pinterest. You can look for ideas and supplies lists etc. Michael's, seriously, if you're out there, let's make this happen. It would save people like me from bumping into every display between your tiny aisles.

Once the creativity was sparked, I had an influx of wreath ideas, but the one that really stuck was this felt feathered look. Feeling inspired by this tutorial of Ryan and Kari's ombre wreath, I decided to do some sort of pattern using felt.

the inspiration via Ryan and Kari

While I thought the ombre look was a cool one, I opted to go for a more uniform, alternating pattern. I didn't want the typical oranges/reds/browns that would literally scream FALL!, so instead I opted for the grays and olive green for that subtle fall feel, with the light blue tossed in for a bit of freshness and whimsy. (Unbeknownst to me, this color scheme was top-of-mind for a reason. These are our new pillows for the couch in the living room... remind you of anything? All I'm missing is the yellow and we'd be that weird couple whose wreath matches their pillows. That's a little much even for me. Whoops!)

Anyway, on to the project! What you need:

• straw wreath (I left the plastic wrapping on...can't remember how big it was and I'm too lazy to measure so... let's just say medium.)
• felt (I bought four sheets of each color, but only ended up using two of each)
• hot glue

The materials for this project amounted to a whopping $7 for the sheets of felt and straw wreath. Can't beat that!

Here's the quick run down on how I did it.

First step, cutting up the felt. I didn't measure or mark anything, so I just eyeballed it and cut each felt sheet into strips about 1" wide. From there I cut those strips into rectangles about two inches long (each strip made four rectangles), and then went through cutting each rectangle to a "leaf-like" triangular point.

Once I had my "leaves" all pre-cut, I determined what I wanted my pattern to look like. I didn't want it to be exact, but I did want it to look evenly dispersed in terms of color, so I just did the same alternating pattern of colors for each row (light gray, dark gray, olive, blue) and then after I finished a row, I made sure to stagger the pattern in such a way that the same colors wouldn't be touching.

I started with one row on the top and made sure to only hot glue the felt to the wreath on the bottom of each leaf so that when my pattern made its way around, my last row would tuck nicely behind the first.

A lot of hot glue later, here's what I came up with...

Best of all, Jason approves! It makes me smile whenever I come home, and I'm thinking maybe I should just press my luck and try to use my other wreath ideas to have one up all year round. (I can literally hear Jas right now, "You give an inch, she'll take a mile..." :)

On a sidenote, it must be mentioned that my new obsession might be felt. I don't know why I had this mental barrier to entering the realm of felt, but I avoided it for the longest time because I felt like everyone was using it. NOW I KNOW WHY. You guys, this stuff is amazing. It comes in a ton of colors, is easily cut, and can be bent and hot glued and sewn and who-knows-what-else into whatever you want. The wheels are a-turnin'!

I hope you guys are having a great week, and let me know how you're getting into the fall spirit!