Hydrangea & Butterfly Wreath

With the hydrangeas in full and gorgeous bloom right now, I thought it was a great time to share this little crafty project with you!

I fell in love a while back with Jasey's craft project over at Crazy Daisy, so I thought I'd try it myself.

It's very inexpensive yet the effect is simple beauty.  The drawback to this project is TIME.  I thought I would roll out this project in an hour or so, but in reality, it took me more like 5 or 6 hours. Of course, that was spread over the course of 2 weeks or so.  I mean, what mom has 5 or 6 hours of uninterrupted craft time in one sitting?!

Here's what you need:

2 or 2-1/2 inch scalloped circle punch or Cricut template

25 or so lunch paper bags 

Styrofoam wreath

pencil or crochet hook

hot glue and gun

ribbon or stock paper for embellishments

Begin by punching out hundreds of circles.  Literally.  I think I got 5 punches out of each side of the paper bag, and each punch resulted in 4 circles, so that's 40 circles per bag.  Mutiply that by 25 and you have 1,000 circles, folks!

Next, wrap a circle around your crochet hook and put a dab of hot glue on the end.

Then, just jab it onto your styrofoam wreath form.  Repeat, and repeat, and repeat until you're sick of stupid scalloped circles.

When it's covered and there is no styrofoam showing, let it sit around for a week or two until you get your mojo back and decide to finish it  cut a few butterflies of varying shapes and sizes to give it a nice finishing touch.  You could also spray paint the "hydrangeas" to make them look more authentic.  I almost did this, because I love the deep blue hydrangeas, but I finally decided against it.

For the butterflies, I just opened up a Word document, typed in "butterflies" in the clipart search form, and picked out the three butterfly shapes that looked the simplest to cut out I liked best.  I then cut them out, traced them on card stock, cut them out again, foled the wings to give them a 3-D effect, and hot-glued them onto the wreath.  I also hot-glued a pop can tab onto the back of the wreath to hang it up.  Voila!

Expenses:

styrofoam wreath form: $2.99

25 paper bags: $.85

hot glue: $3.00

Total Cost: approximately $6.85 

This post is linked to Get Your Craft on Thursday, Strut Your Stuff Thursday, Friday Fun Finds, Fun to Craft Friday, Feature Yourself Friday, Market Yourself Monday, Motivate Me Monday, Talented Tuesday, DIY Day, Take a Look Tuesday, Trash to Treasure Tuesday.