Andy Williams is crooning, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go . . . .” Well, not quite everywhere, but at least at the store where I work. Hanging from a little pop-up Christmas tree in the middle of the store are three-dimensional metal and crystal-embellished ornaments. Rich jewel-toned silky tops, shimmering sweaters, and sequined jackets hang from racks waiting for the holiday spirit to snatch them up. No offense to Pilgrim fans out there, but other than placing a fall wreath on my front door, I did not decorate my home for Thanksgiving. Although I enjoy Thanksgiving because of the obvious three F’s: fall, food, and family, for this holiday crafter there is so much to do with so little time. Like the retail stores, I’ve moved on to Christmas!
With only 12 planned posts before Christmas, I’m offering you my Twelve Posts of Christmas. The contents of these posts won’t stray too far from my original intent, but there will be an emphasis on recipes for entertaining, crafty gifts to make and take, and many other holiday ideas.
Here’s my first holiday idea for you. How about refreshing your front door Christmas wreath? Even if your wreath has seen better days, there’s no need to toss it out. As long as it still has good “bones,” it is salvageable! One of my friends always gets vouchers from me for her birthday. Last year I promised to rework one of her broken necklaces and when I was finished she had a totally different necklace plus two pairs of matching earrings. This year she received a voucher from me to refresh her two front door Christmas wreaths.
It was easy. First I removed faded flower stems by either carefully pulling them off or by cutting them off as close to the glue source as possible. Next, using wire cutters, I removed the bows. Because I wanted to reuse as many original parts of the wreaths as possible, I left the cream-colored berries, pine cones, and leaves on, but took off an overabundance of disintegrating tiny plastic berries and replaced them with more realistic ones. I also removed anything else that was on the verge of falling off.
At my local craft store I selected new ribbon. In my friend’s case, I wanted to get away from the faded, wide, red ribbon that the wreaths were sporting before, because between the poinsettias and the berries there was too much red. I opted for a wide cream brocade ribbon. I thought the light color would look attractive against her black doors and would match the cream-colored berries. I paired up a thinner, gold-edged, transparent, red ribbon with the cream ribbon to tie in the gold of the existing leaves. While at the craft store I also picked up new poinsettias, keeping the same diameter as the old ones, along with the new more realistic berries.
The flowers, berries, and loose items were all hot-glued into place. Pretty new bows were made and instead of placing them at the bottom where they used to be, I positioned the bows at about ten o’clock for the left wreath and two o’clock for the right one. I felt this made each wreath more unique, while still being part of a pair.
Overall, the project took me a couple of hours, but that’s because I was watching a Christmas movie at the same time!
What about this? 