Pallet for Home: Summer Wreath and Mantel {tutorial}

Summer Wreath and Mantel {tutorial}

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Do you go through periods where you are super inspired to do projects and then other periods where you feel burned out and don't want to do anything?? I do. Yesterday I felt super inspired. And I am an impatient crafter. When the feeling strikes, I dig around and find whatever is in my cupboards to make a project.

I was looking at my mantel and I really wanted to make it look

"Beachy" and "Summery".

So I went out in my garage "stash" and found some grapevine wreaths from the Dollar Store. I decided to use the small size. Then I found some black and white pinstripe material. And I crafted up a quick summer wreath with things I had laying around.

This is a 15-minute project.

Here's what I did:

I cut a long piece of the pinstripe fabric 2 inches wide.

Then I wrapped it around the grapevine wreath. I wrapped it pretty tightly and overlapped it so that it was pretty cushy with material.

I secured the end with my trusty glue gun.

Then I took the material and cut a long strip that was 4 inches wide. And I folded it in half and ironed it so it was flat. So now the material is 2 inches wide with a closed end.

I folded the material in pleats, into a flower shape and hot glued in between the pleats. Then I hot glued the flower onto my wreath.

I did the same thing to make two smaller flowers, except instead of a folded 2 inch width, I cut a 2 inch section of fabric and then folded and ironed it so that the folded width was 1 inch.

Then I glued those two fabric flowers on each side of the bigger flower.

I covered two big buttons with fabric and attached them to the smaller flowers.

Then I hot glued a star fish to the bigger flower.

That's it!! SUPER simple and fast AND inexpensive.

Then I set about making my mantel more "Summery" and "Beachy". I got out my glass covered vases and put vintage doorknobs inside of them.

And I talked my son and neice into spray painted an old frame beachy blue for me. I also took a rope bag that I had kept from Target and "framed" it in between an embroidery hoop. I also did this with some doilies.

I made a canvas pennant banner that I thought looked kind of beachy.

I'm not going to show you the whole mantel today though, because I just decided that it needs one more element.

I have a project in mind that I think will be perfect. I'll work on it today. You know when you finish a project and it just doesn't feel complete. That's how I feel about the mantel. I need to work on that last element.

So until then, here's my partially finished Summer Mantel :)