Get crafty with me!

Welcome to my blog! For those of you who may have followed me from my days at LiveJournal, it's so good to see you again. For any newbies, hello and I'm glad you're here.

I wanted to start a blog that had more of a theme and because most of my free time is spent cooking, scrapbooking, and doing crafts, I thought that a blog about those three things (and more!) would be perfect. On this blog I'll be sharing with you really cool ideas for easy-to-do craft projects and paper creations, recipes, and other do-it-yourself projects. I hope this blog serves as an inspiration to aspiring DIYers out there, and I can't wait to be inspired by things that you guys do, as well!

With Thanksgiving and Christmas rapidly approaching, I've already gotten started on making my holiday decorations, as well as some very cool and inexpensive homemade gifts. The first project I worked on was a Christmas wreath inspired by those cute yarn ball wreaths that you might have seen in Starbucks last year (can't wait to see what they do this year!). Well, a fellow blogger decided to make her own yarn ball wreath last year and posted instructions on her blog. I was completely inspired to try my hand at this myself, so a few weeks ago, I broke out the hot glue gun and the supplies I had purchased after Christmas last year (everything was on sale!), laid some newspaper on the floor and got started!

First, if you don't have a hot glue gun and glue sticks, go out and buy some! I got mine at Michael's. (I get everything at Michael's and they frequently give you coupons with your receipt so you can go back and get something else really fabulous for 40% or 20% off!) While you're there, go to the floral section and pick up a wire wreath form. Michael's offered two sizes and I picked the larger size because it looked more like a regular wreath size.

You are also going to need styrofoam balls. You can use varying sizes or all the same size. I used 10 of the same size styrofoam balls.

At Walmart, I picked up two packages of yarn - red and white. I like those colors together for Christmas, but you can do red and green or green and white or whatever combination you want!

The next supplies are what you might want to buy AFTER Christmas to take advantage of sales. That's what I did. I went to Walmart and bought two boxes of cheapo ornament balls in red and silver.

Alright, so let's get started:
1. Wrap the yarn over the styrofoam balls. A tip: you want the yarn to go in different directions so it looks yarn ball-esque. I sort of had trouble with this, but in the end, they don't have to look perfect. Tuck any loose ends under a strand of yarn already around the ball. Do this with both colors of yarn. Because I used 10 balls, 5 were red and 5 were white.



2. On a newspaper-covered surface, lay out the wire wreath form and begin to hot glue the yarn balls to it. Like this:3. Start gluing in the ornaments. I put mine on the inside of the wreath, on the top between the yarn balls, and on the outside between the yarn balls. Make sure you don't skimp on the hot glue. You want these suckers to stick on! The end result is something like this:




4. Hang and admire! Woo hoo! I'm using mine as a door wreath, but you can put yours inside if you want.

So that's that! If you have any questions, let me know! If you have other neat wreath ideas, I'd love to see/hear about them! Stay crafty, everybody!

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