NEW SEASON = NEW WREATH

Since Caleb and I got married and moved into our first apartment, I've made a new wreath for each of the seasons. These wreaths were made without spending any money, too. That's because we're on a bit of a grad school budget over here (aka: only the necessities). But really, it hasn't been hard to make nice looking wreaths while just using materials I already have lying around.

Here's what I did for fall and winter:

For the fall wreath I used a coat hanger, paper clips, hot glue, pinecones spray-painted teal, and chevron burlap ribbon (the ribbon and pinecones were leftover from our wedding).

For the winter wreath I used cardboard, hot glue, paper straws, jute twine, and white acrylic paint (again, the twine and straws were leftover from our wedding).

For spring I wanted to break away from the color scheme we used for our wedding. I also wanted to do something that I could leave up for spring and summer because we'll be moving (temporarily) for the entire summer.

I found this gorgeous wreath on Jones Design Company and knew I wanted to do something similar.
I followed her tutorial for turning coffee filters into paper flowers. It seemed daunting at first, but the more I made the flowers, the easier it got.

I only used three colors of paint: white, yellow, red. I toned down both the red and yellow with white and mixed water with each of them, thus resulting in two colors. For some flowers I only used the red mixture to dye the coffee filters. For others I used only the yellow. And for a third variation I dipped a filter in red and then in yellow. I just played around with the tones and diluted the filters if I thought they had too much color. For the final wreath I also used undyed coffee filters for the white flowers.

Here are my filters as they were drying:

Once dry, I shaped them all into flowers and hot-glued them to a cardboard circle. It took a little while, but I really like how it looks (and it was free!). I think I may even make a few more and attach them to sticks to look like stems...because the flowers looked real pretty in a glass jar.