Cozy Winter Wreath Featuring Wool Roses
Doesn’t it always seem a little barren in the house, when the Christmas decorations come down? Here is a special wintertime wreath, meant to be hung when the Christmas décor is packed away. I have seen a lot of these wreaths on the Internet lately, so I’m not sure who originally came up with the idea, but I think these yarn-wrapped wreaths are absolutely beautiful! I gave them as gifts to some of my relatives this year.
You start by wrapping yarn around and around a Styrofoam wreath form. I used a really bulky variegated yarn, so that the background of the wreath resembled a warm sweater.
I started by wrapping the yarn once around the wreath form, tying a knot and making a loop for hanging the wreath. Then, I just wrapped and wrapped, trying to keep the yarn taut and neat as I went around. (It takes quite a while to do it, so listen to music or watch TV while you are doing this part!) When you get all the way around the wreath, tie the end of the yarn to the original loop.
Now decorate your wreath, with whatever materials you like! I tried to stick to a color palette of grays, ivories, maroons, black, and greens (sage and evergreen). Arrange all the items and then either stitch them in place or use a glue gun to attach them. (Remember that Styrofoam melts, so be careful if you use hot glue.) Here are some of the things I used to decorate my wreaths:
Spiral Roses
I used recycled wool sweaters (washed and dried at high heat, so that they “felted”) to create spiral roses.
I made other spiral roses from regular felt.
I also added some spiral roses snipped from trim scraps that I had in my craft stash.
Fun trims
My local recycled-art-supplies shop had some small snippets of luscious, rich, home-décor trims. They looked like they must have been samples from a sample book, because they were all similar, but in different color schemes.
They were perfect for my project — I just cut short (maybe one-inch) segments and nestled them among the woolen flowers.
Upholstery Selvage Poms
Sometimes when I cut the selvage edges off fabric, I toss them into my trims box. I’ve used them on projects like my L.A. memory book from a previous post. When I went through that trims box, looking for gray trims, I found an interesting selvage edge from gray upholstery fabric.
When I rolled it up and stitched it together, I discovered that it created a pretty pom.
Its colors coordinated perfectly with the yarn on my wreath!
Buttons
I went through my button stash, pulling out all the buttons that went with my color scheme. I used some vintage buttons as centers for some of the flowers I created, and used others by themselves.
Tulle and Trim Flowers
Gathered sections of tulle and cotton trim and textured yarn made pretty little flowers, and the vintage button centeres set them off perfectly.
Felt Balls
In that last picture, you can also see one of the little felt balls I used. Some of these, I bought in packages at my local hobby store.
But a couple of them, I made myself … from the lint that was created when I washed and dried the recycled sweaters. There are some good instructions available on You Tube, on how to make felt balls if you want to make your own.
The wreaths were fun to make and I love how they turned out. Hope you have a cozy winter!
