Hello my beautiful, creative friends!
Ready to spread a little peace today?
This DIY peace sign wreath is:
easy to create
requires little crafting skills
costs nearly nothing
is awesome and cool
Materials needed:One wire wreath form- costs a few bucks and is available at most craft stores. I bought this old one that I used for this project at my local Goodwill store for 50 cents!
Wire - I am using a spool of aluminum electric fence wire that I bought at Home Depot. I love this wire! You can use it for so many great crafting projects! I'll write more about that in another post though, just get yourself a spool of pliable wire and you'll be good to go.
Wire cutters - you will need these to cut the wire
Safety glasses - you must wear these so that you don't get poked in the eye with wire
A glue gun and glue sticks for the glue gun - nothing fancy. I use a small $5 glue gun that I've had for 20 years.
Twigs, sticks, and branches - go to your backyard and gather an armful. I am fortunate enough to have this twig pile in my backyard. Yay.
Optional materials: coffee, a cat (who will try to steal your sticks)
Instructions:
The first thing you need to do is create a peace sign shaped base to glue the branches on. You will create that inside your wire wreath form using the fencing wire.
You will begin by creating the long vertical slash that forms the center of the peace sign.
To begin, cut a length of fencing wire, I used about 3 & 1/2 feet. Take one end of the wire and carefully wrap it around the inner most wire at top center of your wire wreath form. Make your wraps as snug as you can. I went around about four times. Then clip off the extra little end of wire with your wire cutters.
Next, pull your wire down the center of the wreath form to the opposite end and wrap around the inner most wire of the bottom of the wreath form (same as you did at the top) - I wrapped the wire twice around at this spot.
After you do that, again bring the wire back up to your first wrap at the top of the wreath form and wrap twice next to your first wrap, then again to the bottom, repeating until you use your entire length of wire. Four or five times should do it.
Don't worry about the wire being a little bit crooked or kinked, you are only building a base to glue the branches onto and all the wire will eventually be covered with twigs and branches, so no worries.
Once I finished the long vertical center slash, I cut a piece of wire about 6 inches long and wrapped it around all of my center wires to gather them together a bit.
Now your center slash is finished
Next, create the rest of the peace sign by forming the left and right slanted slashes. I used the same process as described above, but with a bit less wire, about 2 feet for each side slash.
Start on either the left or right side, and begin wrapping on the wreath form, and then bring the wire to your center slash where you wrapped that 6" piece of wire and wrap through that, and repeat as you did above until all of your wire is used up.
Then do the other side.
When finished, snip off any excess pointy ends of wire.
Now your base is finished!
Adhering the branches and twigs:
I began by adhering thicker branches first, then the medium sized ones, and saved the smaller, thinner ones to fill in spaces when it was nearly finished.
I worked with one branch at a time, holding it here or there, turning and arranging it until I found a spot on the base where it looked good, then adhered it using the hot glue gun.
I tried to use some curved branches to naturally follow the circular shape of the form, and I also tried to keep it visually balanced in terms of putting an equal amount of the same sized or same thickness branches around the base - meaning, I was careful to not have one side or section look to thick or "heavy." Balance!
I repeated this process of adhering branches all around until the entire base was covered with branches.
That's all there is to it! Now you have a really cool handcrafted piece of nature-inspired home decor. All of your friends will be envious!
...add a string of Christmas tree lights...
What do you think?
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