Winter Wreath on a Snow-Filled Monday

Greetings all! My class was cancelled this morning due to the weather. My term paper is pretty much finished. (I have a few questions for my advisor before I can call it completely done.) I have done all that I can do on the grant proposal until I hear from our microscope guy and I have finished all of my work for my grant writing class. I find myself at a standstill and what do I do? I make a winter wreath for our door since we talked about how we didn't have one! (Don't worry, I watched a little TV while I worked on it so I did do something that wasn't entirely productive! :p)

So about this wreath...

Like one of my favorite professors used to always say, "You work with what you've got." He was referring to the anatomical structures of various vertebrates, but it is still true for this situation. Money, as usual, has been pretty tight and I've had to get creative with cooking. (Last year I got pretty creative with Christmas gifts, but this year we've bought most things because I found some great bargains.) Faced with the desire to have a wreath on our door but lacking the funds to go buy one or to purchase materials to make one, I started looking around at what I had to work with. 

I found yarn...lots of yarn. None of it red and only a small amount of green. Hummmm. I did have lots of white and lots of royal blue. Idea! I'll make it wintery rather than Christmas-y. (My sweet roommie pointed out that we could leave it up longer that way anyway.) So I set about the task of making a winter wreath for our front door.

I started by making pom-poms using the technique from this site. I made 8 relatively similar in size pom-poms using the blue and white yarn. These were so fun to play with!

Next, I needed something to actually make the wreath out of. I knew I didn't have any Styrofoam rings or wreath bases in my project box. I read somewhere that you could roll up newspaper, form it into a ring, and then cover it with ribbon, but I wanted something more sturdy to work with for this project. I started looking around, and found a white, wire hanger. I played around with it for a bit and realized I could shape it into a circle and the hook was already made for me! I used the blue and white yarn from making the pom-poms to wrap the rounded out hanger tightly.

After the base was ready, I used one of the pieces of yarn from each pom-pom to tie the pom-poms onto the hanger. I realized I should have made more pom-poms. I almost started to make more, but then I decided I kind of liked them having a little space in between them...it left room for me to tie ribbons! I attached some shiny blue ribbon with silver polka dots into the blank spaces and made them curly using scissors. I also found a fluffy white bow that I thought would look nice on the top, so I affixed that as well.

Ta-da! Here is the wreath in all of its glory! Made from scratch with things I happened to have lying around the house...no extraneous spending required! :D