It’s Fall Y’all: Door Decor

Well, Thursday marked the start of the Door Decor party over at Rhoda’s for the ‘Its Fall Y’all Series.’ I’m a little late linking up, but oh well!

When I saw this wreath, I fell in LOVE. I knew instantly I had to make it.

The tutorial seemed easy enough, but I was still pretty apprehensive that it would turn out as cute as the original. But I was WRONG. Now, don’t get me wrong. This wreath is pretty time consuming…it probably took me 4 hours total, not including the couple hours of drying time. You can click over to the original tutorial for all the details, but I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the process.

I started by pouring 2 cups of coffee into a 9×13 baking dish and then I dipped all my paper plates in it, crumpled them and laid them out to dry. Added bonus of this project: my hands smelled like coffee for hours afterwards and it was amazing. I’m seriously considering switching out my body wash for French Roast.

I don’t have any drying racks, so I just laid them out on my oven racks and on newspaper on my counter. Then I sat down to watch Hart of Dixie while they dried. (Any of you guys watch it? I love Rachel Bilson, and the show was cheesy but cute.)  Partway through the drying process, I turned around to notice Jordan picking up one of the paper plates and attempting to take a bite out of it. He thought they were tortillas. So yet another added bonus of this project: I discovered that if I’m ever short on tortillas, I can just dip some paper plates in coffee and my husband will be none the wiser.

A couple hours later, I felt like they were dry enough to start cutting my spirals. So, I cut. And cut. And cut. My hand is still cramping. I didn’t try to make my cuts even at all, just went for a general spiral shape, and it got sloppier the more  I did. But I just told myself that would give my flowers a little character.

After I had my spirals all cut, I set up a little burning station like the one described in the tutorial: a candle and bowl of water with a cookie sheet underneath to catch all the paper debris. If I had it to do over again, I probably would’ve burned the edges a little bit more just to add more interest.

Then I got out my hot glue gun and started rolling the spirals into flowers. In the tutorial, she uses craft paste, but I tried that and didn’t feel like it gave my flowers a secure enough hold (maybe because they were still damp from being dipped in the water) so I switched to my hot glue gun and it worked like a charm.

I wanted to add a little sparkle..so instead of using cookie sprinkles, I used a gold glitter pen to add a hint of shimmer to some of the flowers. I wasn’t too impressed with the pen, but oh well. I was just ready to get this beast done. Then I attached some ribbon to my grapevine wreath and hung it up so I could glue all the flowers on.

Here’s the end product:

Please forgive the terrible coloring in these pics. My color balance was all off.

See the little bit of gold I added to some of them?

Even though it took me forever, I’m really pleased with it!