{13 Days of Handmade Halloween} Halloween Flower Wreath

(Today, I'm excited to feature one of the first projects from Oriental Trading used for the 13 Days of Handmade Halloween series shared by my pal, Sunny by Design!  If you're loving this idea, be sure to Pin, Tweet or Insta this post and use #handmadehalloween2013)

First I just want to say I think this 13 days of Handmade Halloween is such a great idea. I love Halloween and I love paper crafts.  So what better way to make a Halloween wreath than with paper flowers.  I recently got to try out the Halloween Flower Wreath Craft Kit from Oriental Trading company. It's very affordable and fairly easy to create.  All the pieces are included and all it takes is a little glue, some creativity and you've got a pretty Halloween wreath.  


The kit came with precut flowers and leaves, felt to hang and make a bow, a cardboard wreath frame and instructions for assembly. 

To assemble this you will also need hot glue(for the bow) and adhesive glue dots (for the flowers). 

I started with the bow.  The felt came in two pieces and wasn't quite long enough for me to tie so I decided to glue the bow in place on top.  

I placed the first strip in the middle of the wreath and glued it closed at the top.  Then I cut off about three inches of the second strip to use for the middle of the bow.  

I cut a little more off the small three inch strip to make it narrower. 

Then I glued the longer strip together at the ends, making as circle.  To make the middle of the bow I glued the small strip around the middle of the larger loop and the bow was done. To finish it off I glued the bow to the very top of the straight felt strip wrapped around the wreath. 

I didn't count the amount of paper that came with this but it was quite a bit.  All the flowers and leaves were precut and only needed to be pushed out of their pages. 

I liked that all the paper was double sided.  The purple had grey on the back and the grey's had a musical notes pattern and a spider web pattern on the back.  I really love the musical notes pattern.  

This is a somewhat time consuming project.  It took me several hours but that's because I started punching out the flowers one by one, one sheet at a time.  Do not do that!  The paper is a little on the thin side, so when you try to punch them out a single sheet at a time the flowers tend to rip. 

The best way to do it is by layering two sheets that have similar flowers or leaves on them and punch them out together.  If you notice there are three sizes of each flower.  Each flower size had two sheets so it worked perfectly that way.  It went much faster and that also kept the flowers from tearing.  

 The next step is to curl your flower petals.  I had planned on curling every single flower but quickly realized there are many more flowers than you actually need.  I used 4 layers of flower petals for each flower and I just used half the flowers in the packet.  The best way to judge how many flowers you will need is to lay them out flat and slightly overlapping on the wreath before you assemble everything.  Then you can judge the number you need to actually curl and save the rest for other crafts. 

Once the petals are curled you can assemble your flower by attaching each layer with a glue dot. The instructions say to keep the similar colors together and only do three layers.  I decided to do 4 or 5 layers for each flower and alternate colors.  I made some large flowers and some small flowers for variety.  

Once all the flowers are assembled and glued onto the wreath, glue the leaves in various spots around the edges.  I used the leaves to fill in any gaps between the flowers and cover up the wreath backing that might peak through.    

Once the wreath was put together I glued a mini banner the bottom to finish it off.  The banner did not come with the wreath.  I designed it to go along with the dark Halloween colors and hopefully compliment the wreath.  

This banner works well as a cake banner too.  

Even though the felt bow is cute I ended up switching to a black ribbon bow which I love. Here it is in action. 

I hope your Halloween is filled with lots of crafts and baking with sweet friends.  Thank you so much Keisha for letting me guest post on your blog.  You are sweeter than candy.

DOWNLOAD THE MINI BANNER HERE

http://www.scribd.com/doc/174602207/Halloween-mini-Banner

Credits:
Halloween Flower Wreath Craft Kit Oriental Trading Company
Printables banner Sunny by Design



Find More from Sunny Here:

https://www.facebook.com/sunnyprints

https://twitter.com/SunnybyDesign
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/113163081207111994025/113163081207111994025/posts

http://instagram.com/sunnyduran

http://sunnybydesign.blogspot.com/

Bloggers using items from Oriental Trading were provided the products free of charge by the company provided their own honest opinion.  Others may have a different opinion or experience with the product(s) listed above.  No other type of compensation was received.