My Personal Pinterest Project : Paper Flower Wreath

(BTW: 4 point alliteration) Pinterest is getting worse than Facebook in the grand scheme of my time-wasting. Especially when DIY crafts are involved. It's amazing how far reaching multi-media is: not only does it waste my time when I'm online, but then it extends to when I'm offline, trying out all the things I saw online. Nice. Luckily for me, though, I have plenty of time to waste this summer while in Texas. So, I took it upon myself to finally try out some of the crafts that I'd pinned (you can see them and some of my other Pinterest boards here). First on the craft to-do list: a paper rose wreath. I hit the jackpot when I got home and found some old encyclopedias and books of the year that my mom was wanting to get rid of. Why get rid of them when you craft with them?!? So that's exactly what I did. I made little paper flowers out of the book pages, and I have to admit, they turned out pretty cute. They look a little more like ranunculus than roses, which I like better anyways. They took FOREVER though. The tutorial warned that the flower-making took a while, but I figured it couldn't be that bad. It was. It was definitely that bad. I got so sick of rolling paper into little flowers. In the end, it took me about two sittings to make enough flowers to cover the wreath (for my own sanity, I didn't pay attention to how long each of the sittings was, but they were most likely over three hours each. Granted, I was also really distracted by movies and TiVo).

My first little flower. The magic of it quickly dissipated after about the first hour. 

Thanks to some coupon circulars from Michael's, I got an 18 inch wreath form for about $3, which ended up being the only thing I had to pay for (score for poor college student budget!). I was so excited to finally start glueing the flowers on the wreath. First, I modge-podged some paper strips onto the wreath form, that way the hot glue wouldn't melt the styrofoam and any gaps would be camouflaged. The tutorial I followed had a really uniform look with all of the flowers basically the same size, but I wanted a more organic look. I'm not really sure if I decided this before or after I realized how hard it was for me to make the flowers all the same size, but no matter. I ended up having a nice range of flower sizes, with a few larger ones that could act as the focal point, then have a gradient down to smaller flowers. In the end, I absolutely love how it turned out. I can't wait to see it on our apartment door! What do you think?