Recycled Wreath

I finally made and put up a wreath above our fireplace which was looking very bare. Now I’m happy

The wreath is made from the cut off stumps from Christmas trees and cardboard. When we got our Christmas tree I saw all these fresh cut ends from the tree lying around - so I got the girls to help me find as many as we could. I knew they’d be cool for something so I brought them home and dried them out.

I had this idea before to make a wreath out of cardboard since we have tons around our house right now (moving and a few trips to Ikea equals a lot of boxes). So I first cut out the wreath shape from a big box and then cut out some leaf shapes. I played around with the wood cuts on the wreath shaped and then placed the cardboard leaves around them. To add dimension to leaves I used an x-acto knife and lightly cut shapes into the leaves and then carefully pulled the paper layer away so the corrugated ridges show. I glued the wood and leaves down with Goop glue (I was running low on glue sticks otherwise I’d use my glue gun). I added red pompoms that I got Dollerama a few years ago and add a few cardboard paper curls that I think almost look like wood shavings.

The one layer of cardboard as a base wasn’t strong enough so I cut 2 more wreath shapes and glued to the back. To hang the wreath up I screwed right through it and into the wall into a drywall plug.

I really like playing with the cardboard, I’m sure I’ll have more projects in the future playing with removing layers of paper from the cardboard. I saw this great artist, Ilona Valcov last summer that made beautiful landscape pictures using this technique. Just looking at her site again I’m even more inspired.

Merry Christmas everyone.