May Flowers a Little Early

St. Patrick's Day is over.  I already marked this by announcing we turned off our Christmas lights.

Another feat - I've changed out the front door wreath.  Last week Maddie and I were discussing if we should decorate it for Easter or Spring in general.  We voted for Easter.  Mike said, "Easter is a week away.  You are going to decorate a wreath for a week?"  Good point.  Spring it was.

Of course that would dictate flowers.  So, I searched the internet for some fabric flowers and came upon Pink Paper Peppermints.  This is kind of a fun site.  She had 31 days of making different flowers and I found my perfect flowers.  The bonus is that it uses scrap fabric!  I have TONS of that so this had the promises of being FREE!

First cut your fabric in circles.  Any size is fine.  I happened to use a glass we had.  You cut 5 circles for each flower and press them.  (The actual finished flower size is comparable to whatever sized circle you originally chose.)

(Ignore the hideous ironing board cover.  I've seen tutorials on quilting one.  Before I spend time on that though, I'd have to get an iron that was guaranteed not to leak.)

Take each circle and fold in half, then fold in half again and press.  Curse your leaking iron and stained ironing board if it makes you feel better.

Next you are going to stitch a running stitch along the curved part of the fabric.  There doesn't have to be a ton of stitches.  You will be pulling these stitches so doubling the thread is a good idea.

Once you get across the curve, pull the thread to create a petal.

Do this for the five petals and when you get to the end, stitch it to the first one.  Once you've secured it you go onto the next flower.  Soon you have a whole pile of these flowers.

Aren't they so pretty and colorful?

You may also notice that they have a gaping hole in the middle.  These flowers probably took less than 5 minutes each to make.  Seriously easy.  So I was very excited to get to the next part of attaching vintage jewelry to the centers.  (I've always wanted to say I used "vintage ______".  Check that off the bucket list.)

I remembered that my mom had purchased a glue gun for me quite a number of years ago and I actually knew where it was.  I ran down to get it only to discover that it was just a gun; no glue sticks were included in the packaging.  It was 8:41pm and I knew I couldn't make it to Michael's before they closed.

But then I remembered that I had borrowed my mom's fabric tacky glue ages ago and I ran upstairs to use that.

Then I remembered that mom took it back a couple months ago.  My last option was washable Elmer's and I didn't see that being a good choice so I had to quit for the night.

Friday I ran to Michael's, bought the glue sticks and got to work.

I had a bag of old jewelry from my grandma that I hadn't used in my previous plans so they were going to work perfectly for this project.  I snipped off the posts of the earrings.  But then I noticed that despite being "older" they actually look pretty new.

I decided to break out the brown glaze we had purchased for the laundry room cabinets and I set to work making my vintage jewelry actually look more vintage.

I wiped on some glaze...then just wiped it off right away.  It got into some of the crevices and dulled up the gold a little.

(hello giant thumb.)

The giant pearl on top was what I was trying to match.  The earring on the left was what I glazed and the earring on the right is what the original look was.

Then I pulled out the glue gun and got to work.  I decided this was a fun little contraption; I don't know why I never pulled it out prior to this!

Because I didn't want to sit and hold eveything, I improvised on "clamps" using what was available.

In gluing everthing together, I realized my vintage jewelry was missing some jewels...

That's okay though because I realized that the other same earring was missing similar jewels.

Still a matching set!

After all that, I attached the flowers to our wreath.

Commercial Break:

Originally our wreath hung using 3M hooks.  These are great indoors, but in our frigid winter weather, they just fell off the door.  I've had to reshape the wreath more than once.  We can't use over the door hangers because we have a widow at the top.  A friend suggested a magnet.  Mike found this at Lowe's:

It's awesome and holds up to about 12 pounds yet the hook is small enough to hide behind my wreah, but just big enough to fit around my wreath.

On with the show!

And the final product:

You may notice the missing, brown "M".  It's been retired for awhile. 

I'm not sure if you can say this was free because I had to buy a pack of glue sticks.  It's a tool though and I generally don't count tools; they can be reused.  If you want to get technical, I used about a quarter of one glue stick, so I'm going to say this cost us about $.15.  I'm good with that.

I had so much fun with the glue gun that I started another project while I was finishing up the wreath.  Wait until you see it.

All I can say is....Yikes.