4th of July Patriotic Wreath

Happy 4th of July!  I've loved all holidays since I was a kid...I just adore having a reason to celebrate even small things in life.  My motto has always been that "anything worth doing is worth overdoing", and there's evidence of that in the birthday presents I buy, the Christmas lights that adorn my house every year, and even the bazillion years of school I've been through.  I can never find classy-looking patriotic decorations in the big box stores, so I broke out my Silhouette Cameo to make my own this year.  Using a 3D design by Samantha Walker that I found in the Silhouette online store here, I cut out 35 spiral flowers from a variety of papers in the We R Memory Keepers Red, White, and Blue Collection.

The secret to making them look a little more natural is curling the petals...I started out by curling the inner petals upward and the outer petals downward.  Then I rolled the flower and adhered it together using super-sticky double-sided tape because I wanted these to stand up to the humidity outside.

To form the base of my wreath, I wrapped an 18 inch wire wreath frame with burlap garland.  I chose these materials because I wanted a wreath base that would be reusable for other holidays.  When the summer season is over and my paper flowers are inevitably faded and worn, I can remove them and attach Halloween flowers if needed.

Once I had rolled nearly 3 dozen of these, I decided the simplest approach for attaching my flowers would be to use medium-large wooden buttons threaded with floral wire.  I could thread the wire through the hole in the center of my flower, then through the burlap, and twist them together on the backside for a very secure hold.

I actually really liked the look of just a couple of bunches of flowers with a lot of burlap poking through, but I chose to keep adding flowers until the base was nearly full.  Perhaps next time I'll stick with the more country-chic look and just add a few flowers, but I felt that this was a holiday worthy of a very showy patriotic piece.  I love how it turned out and was thrilled with how it looked on my bright blue door.  Thanks for stopping by!

Materials:

Paper - We R Memory Keepers Red, White, and Blue Collection

Wooden buttons - the Paper Studio

Silhouette Design File - flower spiral star (Design #25476 in the Silhouette Online Store)