DIY- Wreath

Memorial day is here, and I don't care what the calendar says, it's officially summer!  To celebrate, I have made a new wreath to decorate the door for the coming months.  Made out of actual sticks.  Yes, actual sticks I got from actual trees.  I find that they smell better than the plastic ones you can find at craft stores, and definitely make the wreath look more appealing too.

Things you will need:

Floral Wire

Sticks (15-20)

Flowers & Butterflies

Burlap Ribbon (Tutorial can be found here)

Scissors

Rustic Wooden Letter

Hot Glue

To start off, I went to the trail behind my house and gathered a bunch of sticks, I didn't get a picture, but I tried to get ones that were about 3 feet long and no more than 2 cm in diameter.  I took them home to the backyard and inspected each one for bugs and washed them all down with a high setting on the hose.  

Depending on how much rain you have been getting, you can skip the next step, but I recommend it anyway:  In order to make the sticks more flexible, you're going to want to soak them in a warm to hot bath for a few hours, or overnight.  

Once they were bendable, I followed this tutorial for making the actual wreath.  Basically, I just made a ring out of one of the sticks and tied it off with some floral wire, then kept wrapping more sticks around it until I was satisfied with the thickness.  At one point, I ran out of sticks that were long enough or thick enough to wrap around, so I began tying the smaller ones into the wreath with the floral wire.

After I had fussed with the wreath to my liking, I began to cut the flowers from their bushels and used hot glue to attach the stem to a strip of floral wire, which made it easier to tie them in.  I also found some cute little butterflies at the Dollar Tree so I put those in too.

At this point, you can leave the wreath like it is, but I thought it would be cool to personalize it with an "M" for my name.  I used hot glue to attach a strip of wire to the back of the letter, and also a burlap bow.

I tied them to the wreath and was happy to be done with my new decoration!