St Patrick's Day Wreath

I don't consider myself a crafty person, but I have been itching lately to make something. With St Patrick's Day coming up I decided that I would do something for that holiday and since we didn't have a wreath for the door I knew what my project would be! So off to Pinterest I went to look for ideas and found a blog about making a wreath out of material and a wire coat hanger. The only problem Teresa and I had was we didn't have scrap material and we didn't have a wire coat hanger. I would not be daunted though and off to Wal-Mart and Hobby Lobby we went to get supplies.

What you will need if you don't have a coat hanger is this wire wreath frame like this:

We also purchased quilting squares in 12 different patterns in colors of green, yellows, green-browns and even a blue with green and yellow flowers on it. We then cut them per the blog I found into 1" wide by 6" long strips.

Once cut and stacked we then made stacks of 15 strips for each wire on each section. The instructions to make the wreath seemed very easy until we started tying them onto the frame and found that 1" by 6" strips were a little too short. 

When I make my next wreath we will cut the strips in 1" by 8" strips, that should be easier to tie, but not sure how it will look in the end, so stay tuned for that next adventure.

The other thing we figured out as we went along that were not in the blog I found, but might be helpful to you is the placing of the material. First start by identifying which side of the material is the print side:

Its a little hard to see in the photo, but the piece on the left is lighter than on the right, so the right is the print side of the material. This is the side you want on the outside. Then take the strip and fold it in half like below:

This narrows the material and makes it easier to get a good tight knot which in the end will allow longer tails once tied. Once you fold the material in half slip it under the metal wire like so:

After that its simply tying one knot and then a second knot and slide it to the side to you can repeat the process:

I also found out that its easier to do the inner wire first, then move out each wire to the outside a section at a time. At first Teresa was doing one tie in each wire and found that as we were going we were smashing what we had already done and as we got closer to the end of the section it was harder to have room to tie the strips. 

As I was going along I was a little worried about what the end product was going to look like because I felt like colors seemed to be bunched together, but in the end the whole thing looked really good.

Teresa and I really enjoyed ourselves making this wreath together, I think its simple and pretty and personally I think it looks better than the one I found on Pinterest. lol

I hope you take the time to make this project.

Dianna