Black and Yellow Wreath Making

A little tardy to the party, we have the Vargo Christmas wreath. You might remember that this was on my to-do last year, but a shipping mishap put it on the back burner until, oh, this week. We were behind my imaginary, mental time lime for the tree, so at least we’re running on a theme here. I’m nothing if not consistent.

I know there are loads of wreath write-ups swirling around the blogosphere, and while I find myself gravitating towards, well, pretty much all of them, I stuck to my original guns on this one. Using this tutorial from ReadyMade (RIP), I started with a 10″ foam wreath form, a lot of 500+ buttons (found here – last year! – via Etsy), ribbon, billy buttons (er, Craspedia), a hot glue gun and glossy white spray paint.

It surprisingly only took about 20 minutes to cover my wreath completely with the hot glue – and yes, I burned myself, but just once. Of course this was complete user error (i.e., watching the television and not my hands). The back was left alone, since in our case, it’s nesting place will be up against a door.

In addition to the back, I left a 2-inch section bare, and in that space, I placed the billy balls at random using their short, cut stems as my poking device. Once I got the pattern I liked, I pulled them back out.

While the buttons alone were cute, the overall look was a bit too unpolished for our taste – although, I imagine it could work as-is in a different setting, right?

I had originally purchased the all-white button lot just to see if we’d like the end result (as suggested by you guys back in the day!), but ultimately we decided on the standby – a fool-proof glossy white. Out came the spray paint.

Once dry, the billy balls were put back, and we used ribbon to hang it over our utility door. On the other side is a rack for our ironing board, so I used that as a hook of sorts to hide the ribbon ends.

It’s a little guy (so just be sure to up your button count if you choose a larger wreath form), but the scale seems to be a good fit for our entry – as if it’s the big brother to our small art wall.

It may not really be very Christmas-y, but then again, I’m not generally a very wreath-y person (although, I’ve admired them from afar). So by default, it’ll become our very own version of a Christmas wreath, and it’ll hang with us this time of year. Sadly, this year was cut a bit short. Regardless, it’s cute, yeah? And we bring the black and yellow; word. (Always important to Pittsburgh-anything fans like us!)

What do you think? Are you squeezing in one more project? Eh, maybe that’s reserved for crazies like this one. Or, perhaps, egg nog and an early bedtime is looking much better for the weekend ahead…