An A-Door-able Wreath

   When I brother asked me to create a wreath for the door of our apartment, I'll admit, I sort of panicked. Not because it was such an extreme request, but because I realized that Christmas is real and truly on it's way and I have gotten almost no shopping done for family and friends. So instead of solving that problem, I took my brother up on his challenge and decided to make a wreath for our door (yes, the old standby of productive procrastination).

    For some reason, I felt the need to use ribbon in this project. After buying the ribbon, I had no real idea of how to attach it or how to make a ribbon wreath. So, while walking around the store, I bought a set of fancy pearled topped pins, figuring I might be able to wrap the ribbon around itself and pin it to keep it together.

    When I got home, I checked pinterest to see if I could find any good ideas, but none of them really spoke to me (they were either too girly or not fancy enough.) So I thought about my original plan, and came up with this easy 2 hr. wreath:

Materials:

• Extruded Styrofoam ring (mine was about 12" across)
• 2 different colors of 2.5" ribbon
• 2 or more different colors  of 1/4" ribbon (I had 4 - yay for 50 cent ribbon spools at Michaels)
• Sewing scissors (believe me, using regular scissors on this project would have been ridiculous)
• Straight pins
• Tape (optional)

 

How To:
*Note: I kept to a certain pattern of 1 piece of 2.5" green ribbon with 1 piece of red 1/4" ribbon alternating with 1 piece of 2.5" red ribbon and 2 red 1/4 ribbons, but feel free to mix it up. 
   
1.     Gather all materials. Figure out how long of a piece of ribbon you will need to in order to wrap it around thickness of ring 1 1/2 times. If you like, you can pre-cut a few pieces of all the different types of ribbon you will be using to make it easier.
  
2.     To make it easy to wrap multiple pieces of ribbon, I put a piece of tape on the hidden end of each ribbon with the multi-ribbon layout I wanted. (3rd and 4th picture above)
  
3.     Now, wrap the ribbon around itself, so that you have the raw edges of the ribbon pointing away from the wreath. This part can be kind of tricky, but after doing it a few times, it got easier.
   
4.     Next, secure the ribbon with a pin to keep it in place (I only placed a pin into the center of each piece of little ribbon so that it would also keep the bigger one in place, but if you want to add more pins, go for it.)

5.     I decided to cut the raw edges of the ribbon into a V shape, but you could also just cut from one edge on the diagonal to make a right triangle shape instead.

 5.     Continue wrapping ribbon around the wreath, securing with pins working your way around in one direction (so that the new ribbon slightly overlaps the previous ribbon on the wreath) and making sure that none of the Styrofoam peaks through.
  
6.     If you reach the end of the wreath by successfully finishing your pattern with no gaps, I am jealous. If, however, you realize (like I did) that you were off on your pattern and have a gap space (eek), don't panic (like I did.) Instead, you can use this as the top part of your wreath.
   
7.     Just unwrap the two ribbons on either side of the gap and wrap a coordinating color of fabric/ribbon around the wreath (I used white), securing with pins. Re-wrap the two ribbons on top of this piece of new ribbon so that their is no Styrofoam showing.

8.     Next, take smaller sized (1/4") pieces of ribbon and tie with a knot around the coordinating ribbon/fabric, so that it is mostly covered up. I cut the edges of these tied ribbons at a diagonal.
  
9.     Tie off a loop of ribbon and put a pin through the ribbon. Push the pin through the top of your wreath and hang on your door.  It looks just as cute either way you hang it; pins or no pins side.