Tuesday, December 1, 2009

A bulb ornament Christmas wreath mini tutorial

I first saw this cute little wreath on eddieross.com while I was browsing around the web looking for some cheap and easy DIY holiday decorations.

Mine's not quite as cute or as symmetrical as Eddie's is, lol, but I still sorta like it. I'm not sure it's going to live on my mantel forever either, I think I'll wait and see how I like it once I get the rest of my decorations up.

Anyway, here's the low down-

Supplies:
-1 wire coat hanger (the white coated ones are easier to work with than the gold ones)
-Approximately 80-100 bulb ornaments in various sizes.
-Hot glue


I went to the Dollar Tree yesterday and they have ornaments GALORE there. Aside from the white bulbs, which I was anal about and hunted all over RI for, I bought all my bulbs there and my total at checkout was $7.49, so this is easily a craft that can be done for under $10.

First and most important- lift up the caps on your ornaments, add a dab of hot glue and secure them to the bulbs. If you skip this step, you're going to spend a lot of frustrating time trying to reattach bulbs that come popping off as you start to fill the wreath and the ornaments start getting packed in tighter.

Once the caps are secured, sort them into types so you know what you've got for variety and as you're adding them to the wreath, keep it random. Patterns seem to get messed up because the bulbs continuously shift around slightly as your formation takes shape.

Okay now for the actual wreath. Pull the wire hanger into a circle shape and untwist the top. Next, you just need to slide the ornament loops onto the hanger until you're out of room (and again, keep it random!)

When you get to the ends of the wire, You can either twist them back together and hang from the hook (covered by a bow as Eddie did) or twist the ends together and tuck them in behind the bulbs like I did, if you don't want a bow.

Viola, a bulb wreath! :)

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