Make A Fall Wreath, step by step

I do not know if it is the crisp autumn breeze or the explosion of all things pumpkin on Pinterest, but a few days ago I woke up jonesing to make a fall wreath. Yes, some people have chocolate cravings, but I have craft cravings. Come to think about it, I also have chocolate cravings. Is there a correlation? Someone needs to study this.

Some of you have even been requesting more small crafty projects (like these) which have consistently been in the mix, but lately we have been so busy painting, stripping wallpaper, & renovating the sunroom that little homemade updates seem to have fallen by the wayside. But not anymore. The truth is we have missed them too! So I thought a low-cost and straightforward fall wreath would be a lively place to start. Heck, even if the house behind this door is still half wallpapered, that does not mean the door has to whisper “there are five seashell sinks going on in here.”

This whole thing only took about a half hour to make, and I got all of my supplies to make a pleasant big 25″ wreath for under 15 bucks (all of which are faux, so I can break this baby out year after year). So let us call this a naptime project. Or a do-it-at-11pm-while-you-watch-Scandal project.

Here is what I picked up: a 25″ wreath for $6.99, a plastic pot of faux orange flowers for $4.99, and a stem of orange berries for $2.99, all from Garden Ridge (they in fact have a fairly exhaustive faux flower section, and the prices seemed lower than some of the stems/plants I have seen at Michaels).

My first step was cutting all of the flowers off of the plant and clipping each of the berry branches off of the stem, so everything was freed up to be stuck into the wreath.

I ended up removing the green leaves (simply clipping or pulling them off as I went) since it looked a little too jungle-ish (and not quite fall-ish) with them on. Then I simply stuck the larger flowers around the wreath, using their stems to hold them in place by shoving them into the wreath. You might notice that there are 15 flower-bunches in the wreath on the left of the picture below, but there are only 8 of them above on the table. Well, I realized that each bunch on the table could be further pulled apart, to make smaller bunches that could be somewhat evenly spaced around my wreath. At this point it was looking a little more Hawaiian than I hoped, but I thought the berries might fall things up once I took out their greenery and shoved them around the perimeter.

There is certainly a little noodling that happens between spacing everything out the first time and calling it done…

… I moved some berries and flowers around for about ten more minutes, simply to come up with what I thought looked nicely spaced out. I liked when some of the berries spilled over the outside of the wreath for that whole autumn/abundant/Thanksgiving vibe.

Admittedly with a cheerful blue door, the bright orange wreath feels fairly glad (as in, it likely could work for spring or summer as well) but when you get closer and see those berries there is certainly a pleasant fall-ish feeling. And as for how I hung it, I simply used one of those 3M wire Command hooks (the ones that stick to the door and can be peeled off later without harming the paint).

Oh yeah, and our little porch annuals bit the big one a few weeks back thanks to some fairly cold nights…

… so two potted mums from Home Depot brightened things up. We are still hunting for a new light fixture and a wider door mat, but the wreath and those mums certainly add a little more “welcome” to our porch in the meantime.

Simply pretend you do not notice those two foot tall weeds hiding behind the bushes in the background of this picture. They can be our little secret, right?

What little crafty projects are you folks doing these days? Is there any other fall decorating and wreath making going on? It feels so pleasant to dive back into these swift and smile-inducing projects again. Sometimes hours spent stripping wallpaper or painting trim are not nearly as exciting as a thirty minute craft-fest with some fake flowers.