Let's get wreathy!

Who doesn’t love a good wreath?

The cool part about wreaths is that they can be for any occasion, holiday, or time of year. The second cool thing? They’re usually small enough that they can be made with lots of different scrap materials and still look beautiful. Paper, fabric, soda cans, ribbon, organic material — you name it, I bet a wreath could be made out of it.

Let’s check out some of my favorite wreaths that we’ve created.

Table of Contents

• Who doesn’t love a good wreath?

• Paper Wreaths

• Fabric Wreaths

• “Junk” Wreaths

• Organic Wreaths

Paper Wreaths

Even though most bills and even promotional materials have gone “paperless” these days (yay!), that somehow doesn’t stop lots of companies and organizations from sending endless amounts of snail mail, most of which ends up in the trash. (Ngl, I have definitely tossed things without even opening the envelopes.) But you can easily create a wreath with these.

Fabric Wreaths

According to the EPA, every year, 11.3 million tons of textile waste ends up in landfills in the US. That accounts for a whopping 85% of all textiles. When donating to places like Salvation Army or Goodwill, anything that is torn or stained is discarded because it cannot be sold. So why not use scrap fabric for wreaths?

This works best with wire wreath forms, similar to this:

You can use the fabric to build up the shape and get the shape that you want. Then you can just wrap more fabric or ribbon all along the wreath for the finish. For this one, I used old t-shirts to build up the shape, and then wrapped it in burlap ribbon. Then I used satin ribbon to make the flowers.

“Junk” Wreaths

This is by far my favorite kind of wreath. I made this wreath using old soda cans cut into leaves (using Cricut) and spray painted, scrap fabric flowers, pinecones, beads, floral wire, ribbon, and real twigs. Plus I used some scrap poplar and a wood burning tool to create the word art.

This wreath was made from exclusively soda cans. I saved soda cans for months (paying careful attention to the color), and cut the leaves out by hand, using some tin snips. Then I hot glued them to a wire frame.

Organic Wreaths

Every year, I get a real tree for Christmas, and it always requires a bit of trimming before it goes in the stand. The pine smells soooo good and the excess branches are usually many that I feel bad just composting them. So I turn them into wreaths.

For the decorations, I just hot-glue some floral wire to the back of the bell/bow/pinecone and then twist the around the branches to secure them. I also sometimes use alligator clips in a similar fashion.