Thursday, May 17, 2012

How to put off housework!! Or the $6 wreath

So yesterday I was not very motivated to clean house.  Not even close to motivated.  More like, yeah---I soooo don't want to clean house.  But I still wanted to keep my Domestic Diva status and in order to accomplish that goal I had to find something to do make it look like I was truly in my Domestic Divaness role.  So, being the best at putting off work, I decided to make a quick (well not so quick) wreath.

This wreath could be free if you have the supplies lying around your home.  I, did not have the fabric so I bought some at Wally-World.  I bought 6 fat quarters (99 cents each) in cordinating fabric for my little DIY project.

I had a wreath from the fall, that I bought years ago.  I even think, if I am not mistaken, it survived the house fire.  So this wreath has been around a time or two.  But the flowers and leaves were falling off.  I cleaned out the laundry room last week and was going to throw it away, but decided to upcycle it instead.  I started pulling out the stems and off with the flowers. 
So here it is in the process of being destroyed...err I mean taken apart.  Once upon a time it was a pretty little wreath.  Now, I will confess I did not save the flowers or leaves.  I couldn't come up with something to upcycle them into and since I live in a small home and am not able to always collect supplies (in mass quanties) I decided...the trash it goes.  So they did.
Here is my naked wreath and my fat quarters.  Sorry the picture quality is not the best, but you get the idea.

Now here is where the fun started.  I did have one issue and lost half a fat quarter to trying to figure it out, but we survived and now I will tell you the RIGHT way to accomplish this, given the tools I had available to me. 

Cut fat quarters in half and then half again.  Because the material is cotton you can make one cut, then rip.  (but not the little strips....hence loosing half of one fat quarter, little streamers makes a lot of threads flying everywhere and looks horrible!)

Then take each quarter and cut into strips.  Oh wait, let me back up...the wreath I am using is small in diamater, so if you are using a larger wreath you need to have longer strips and will need to cut your differently.  Wheww...I almost forgot to pass along those words of wisdom!! 

After cutting strips for a while if finally dawned on me, I could fold the 1/4 of a fat quarter in half and cut strips that way and save some cutting time.  For the record I did not worry about my strips being straight and neat.  All I was doing is making a wreath.  If you need to have straight fabric strips, then by all means have at.....if I owned a rotary cutter and mat, I would have straighter strips then I ended up with.  Of course if you have pinking sheers, those would make cute fabric strips as well.  I didn't...so....well you get the point.

Once all my little strips were cut, I just got to tieing, tying?  How in the heck do you spell tie-ing?  Anyway....I tied strips on there forever.  There was a point where it was starting to loook very ugly and I was worried, but thankfully it all came out.

And wah-la!!  Isn't cute.  If you look closely you will see a lot of speckle marks and places where the paint is gone on our door.  It rained out here and what we can figure is the rain knocked the paint off.  (if you have to understand, rain in West Texas is a B.I.G. thing!!)  So hopefully soon, I will have a bright blue door, as I have threatened to paint it that color. 

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