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Sunday, January 8, 2012

[Make] Flower Heart Wreaths


After the bright and shiny Christmas decor comes down and after all the holiday hoopla, I usually find myself yearning for simplicity-- simple shapes, soothing colors... anything calm.

I had wanted to hang small wreaths in our windows this Christmas, but never got around to it. Since I'm impatient and can't wait a whole year, I decided to adapt the idea for Valentine's Day.  However, since I'm not quite ready for my home to look like Cupid's lair... I decided to go with simple white flowers.

Click "Read more" for the tutorial

Flower Heart Wreath Tutorial
supplies:  2 floral stems (i have enough here to make 3 hearts), glue gun, floral wire cutters

cut off the main stem.  do this on 2 stems of flowers.

see the notches in the stem?  
bend it there into a half-heart shape. bend both stems together to duplicate the shape.
this will become the frame for the heart.

using your hot glue gun, put a dollop of glue at the joint to connect the 2 stems.  
one for the top of the heart, and one for the bottom.

to strengthen the bond, cut off a leaf and glue it around the 2 joints.

then, decide how you want your heart to look-- all flowers?  flowers and leaves?
leaves on bottom, flowers on top?  then let the gluing begin!

Since I can never seem to make the same thing more than once, I made 3 versions of the flower hearts--

heart #1: 
all flowers

heart #2: 
leaves at the bottom, climbing stems in the middle & a dense amount of flowers at the top

heart #3:
flowers & leaves combined

Here they are hanging in our kitchen windows--

it was hard for me to photograph against the light...  one of these days i'll take a photography class!

These wreaths add a little pretty to our kitchen nook. My favorite part about this project is that it looks simple and it IS simple-- No need to buy expensive wreath forms or wrangle a wire hanger into a cute shape.  And although the heart-shape can sometimes be limited to Valentine's Day, I think these fit perfectly into both Winter and Spring decor.

It's still warm and sunny out there so I've been coerced into playing catch in the backyard.  :)  Hope you had a great weekend!




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