PRESTO CHANGO WREATH

Hello!  It's official.  Thanksgiving is over and I can now say Happy Holidays!  I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving enjoying family and friends.  I know we are blessed with great family and yummy food. 

A while back (more like a month and a half ago!) I started a fall wreath to share.  Clearly, I did not post it during the fall months.  Why, Cheryl?  Well, turns out, I did not realize just how long it takes to wrap an entire wreath with yarn!  EE GADS... hours! 

All the yarn-wrapped wreaths on Pinterest and such look so classy and simple.  I really wanted to make my own.  I bought a straw wreath, a nice, oatmeal colored yarn and some felt. 

I sat down with a friend to chat and make a wreath on a crazy crafty evening and 4 hours later, I was only halfway done!  Ok, so maybe it was the chatting that slowed me down.. but I think NOT. 

Many weeks later, and bit by bit, I finally completed covering the wreath. (Hint: leave the plastic covering on if you buy a straw wreath)

Needless to say, I did not want all this work to go to waste.  Enter: The Presto Chango Wreath!  It can be fall, it can be winter... the possibilities are endless. 

Here's how I did it.  Make flowers and leaves out of felt. 

Do not worry about the "circle."  The flowers look better when they are not symmetrical.  After you cut a circle out of felt, start from the outside and continue cutting around your circle until you get a spiral that looks like the right picture.  Roll up, starting with the outside and working your way in.  Hot glue the bottom. 

Now the most important tool in our wreath: Straight Pins!! Place your flowers and leaves where you want them on the wreath and just add a few pins to keep them in place.

You can see the pin in the leaf above.  I just pinned all my flowers down and here is the fall version.

Simple and pretty.  But let's not stop there!! Breakout a ziploc bag, pull out your fall flowers and stick them in for next year. 

Find some pins with a head on them.  I painted mine gold for poinsettias. I made three flowers for the Christmas version so I needed 9 pins total.  A little craft paint and I was good to go.

I made the poinsettias out of the same pieces of felt I had left over.  I just cut out 5 petals and then bunched them together with hot glue.  (You could use thread as well.) Arrange them on your wreath and add your painted pins to hold your flowers. 

I am so happy that I was able to make two wreaths!  The first wreath cost me about $10.00.  The second - $0.00!!  I used the materials leftover and now you can have a wreath that does more too!!

Here they are together!

Do you have any crafts that are interchangeable?  Save you time by doing double duty?  I would love to see them!  Leave a comment and share, share, share.  Much love!

Addtional Note:  A few of you have asked if I rewrapped the wreath because the colors of the yarn in the above picture look different.  Nope, same color yarn.  Bad photography.  Really it was just the way the sunlight was coming in on the two different days I took the pictures.  Thanks for your questions!!






I'm linking up over at:
The Happy Housie - Fall Challenge Link Party

LADY BUG LAMP

Hello there!

After a crazy couple of weeks (hurricane!), I think we are finally starting to feel back to normal.  I wanted to share with you one of the fun projects I did for the Boo's Ladybug Room. 

I wanted a cool lamp, but didn't want it to be too over the top.  The red I was going to paint on the wall was making me nervous, so I decided to make the accessories simple.  Here is the finished product.

This is how easy peasy this was! I saw this lamp and lampshade at Target (is there anywhere else?!?!) and knew it would be perfect.  I also bought a simple plastic grass mat and some sparkly clay.

I made a ladybug out of the clay.  It was fun to make something with my own hands.  (If this was anything but a ladybug though, I would have asked BFF The Enabler to mold something as she creates amazing things with fondant)  It would be fun to give clay to your kids too and let them make the animals.  

The glass lamp is completely open on the bottom so I placed the mat underneath and trimmed off the excess with utility scissors.

I also plucked off all the extra grass and added it into the lamp to make the mat a bit more full.  Waste not! 

Here it is all finished up and in Boo's room.  I just love the lady bug inside there. SQUEAL!

Just think!! You could get the same lamp and add mounds of sand paper and then mold dinosaurs or race cars... You could mold butterflies and add them to wire and attach them to a grass mat to make it look like they were flying around.... OR you could get branches from outside and place them in the lamp with a molded owl... Oh boy... I could go on!  Such fun things!

I hope you are having a great week!  Please feel free to pin the pics and leave a comment to let me know you stopped by!! I would love to hear from you!

******UPDATE******** I'm SUPER excited to adding this post to the Creating With Stars Contest over at East Coast Creative!! I love those fellow PA girls!!  Please hop on over to the party and click on my link... Please, pretty please!  One of the entrys with the most click overs gets to be one the contestants!!!