Valentine's Day Wreath

I am currently in the middle of making a rosette wreath (blog post to come) but it is very time consuming and I'm betting that at the rate I'm going it is going to take over a month to make... So in the mean time there is nothing hanging on my front door and the house just looks kind of sad.

I decided that while I'm still working on the rosette wreath that I would make a simple (super cheap!) wreath for the nearest holiday, Valentine's Day.

I found the tutorial for this wreath on The Hybrid Chick's blog (through Pinterest). Her wreath is considerably more glamorous than mine, but I am pleased with the outcome of my wreath considering the time I put into it and the materials I used. Plus, Valentine's day is in 4 days, so the wreath isn't going to be hanging long. It took me about 25 minutes start to finish (including gathering the supplies, creating the wreath, taking a picture, hanging the wreath, and cleaning up!) and I used all materials that were leftover from other projects. This one didn't cost me anything (free is my favorite!) but a little time.

For this project I used the following:

   4 different colors of scrapbook paper (you don't need much, all of mine were long scrap pieces)

   mini stapler (but I suppose a full size stapler would work too)

   a piece of ribbon

On The Hybrid Chick's example she printed out cool designs on both sides of photopaper to use for her wreath. Well, quite frankly, ink is too expensive for me to print double sided on photopaper (which also isn't cheap!) so I dug through my scrapbook papers and found a few pages that I had cut off of but still had a long section left untouched. I used two pieces of 2x11" of each color (4 colors, 8 strips of paper total). I cut the strips to the right size (2x11) and folded each in half.

Next, I found my mini stapler that I used to keep in my backpack in college. I had a couple of professors that would knock 10 points off of your assignment if the pages weren't stapled together, so that little stapler saved me many times! Plus, I charged people a dime to use it last minute if they forgot to staple their papers... Good ole mini stapler... good times...
Anywho! I grabbed my mini stapler and put two little staples in each strip making them into heart shapes. (see Hybrid Chick's example, she's got a great picture of what the hearts should look like). In the tutorial, she used mini glue dots. I don't have any of those (I've never heard of them actually), but if you wanted to use glue rather than staples, you could just use a hot glue gun to get the job done.

After I finished forming all the hearts I laid them out on the floor in a circle until I got them to look roughly how I wanted. Then I grabbed my handy dandy mini stapler again and stapled the hearts together in a circle.

Lastly, I attached the ribbon hanger by tying knots in each end of the ribbon, sliding the ribbon in between two hearts and stapling the other side to make sure the ribbon couldn't slip from side to side. Based on The Hybrid Chick's recommendation, I put 3 hearts between the ribbons and found that it hangs quite nicely.

Not too bad for 25 minutes and no cost out of pocket! 

Update: I hung this wreath on my door for 3 days... and it didn't do so well! I can't really be surprised though because the weather has been crazy with almost constant wind, some rain, and even a little snow. The wreath didn't get wet, but all the moisture in the air made the paper lose its stiffness and the whole thing went limp. Lesson learned: This is an indoor only wreath!