Dollar Store Wreath

There is definitely nothing too extraordinary in this post; I made a wreath--from stuff I bought at the dollar store. But I had fun and decided to document the process.

After dropping my husband off on campus, I decided to do a little dollar store shopping. I purchased a wreath frame, 7 sprigs of flowers and foliage and a roll of ribbon. I did not use the roll of ribbon in the end. Two of my sprigs were purely autumn leaves, one was berries, and the rest were flowers. One of those flower sprigs had little flowers on a central stalk and the rest were larger flowers, some with smaller "bud" type flowers mixed in. Six sprigs came from the "harvest" section of the silk flowers. The final sprig I found in the Christmas section. An y guesses which? I find it somewhat ridiculous that there is a Christmas section in September, but I digress. Anyway, the Christmas sprig is the burlap flowers.


Now, I like burlap well enough, but burlap does not really read as Christmas to me. But hey, what do I really know? I am sure someone could make these burlap poinsettias work for Christmas and I would love it. The dollar store set-up, however, didn't really do it for me, and if these flowers hadn't been next to poinsettias in other colors and materials (and hadn't been labeled) it wouldn't have immediately occurred to me what type of flower they were meant to be. Thus, I decided to take a tiny bit of a risk and put them in my wreath. Burlap does say "autumn" to me and I liked the contrast.

When I arrived home, I fed Peter, pacified David, and then I set about cutting all the flowers off the sprigs. David helped by spreading them all over the kitchen. Then we sorted them into piles of leaves and flowers.

I put the flowers on the wreath in different ways, getting an idea of what I would like to do with them. It was during this stage that I decided that the burlap flowers stood out so much I needed to give them special care. I decided I didn't like them equally spaced and everything else looked unbalanced. Thus, I decided to make them intentionally unbalanced and put them all in one area, which created a nice bit of visual interest. This is also when I nixed the ribbon, which was probably for the best. It  makes the wreath look much less fussy.

Once I had a bit of an idea of what I wanted to do with the flowers, I set about attaching about half of the leaves as a sort of backdrop. My theory was that they would help fill in the wreath, but attaching them first kept them from covering the flowers. I reserved the other half of the leaves to fill the bare spots that would be left after I put in the flowers. I put the leave on in a pattern that appeared random. In reality, way too much thought went in to it to actually be random.

To finish, I filled in with individual blossoms (starting with the largest and getting smaller), leaves, and finally the stalk flowers and the berries.  I am generally pleased with how it turned out. I can't decide for sure if the burlap flowers are too Christmas-looking after all. To be honest, in the picture at the left, it is harder to tell it is burlap than it is in person and therefore it looks more like I put Christmas flowers in an autumn wreath. If I decide I don't like it, I can always take them off and fill in with some extra leaves and shift a few flowers.



This post was featured at Tatertots and Jello.