Wreaths and a Wedding

Dec 31, 2015
2 min read

Well hello dear friends! It's been QUITE a long time since I was last active on my website. There's a particularly shiny, round, and rather beautiful reason for that.

I GOT ENGAGED!

Photo courtesy of Frames of Joy

That's right! My hunny and I are getting married at the end of January, which is the primary reason why I haven't been actively working on any projects for the past few months. I've had so many other things to do, as you can well imagine.

Photo courtesy of Frames of Joy

As we're winding down to the nitty-gritty details, I had a few craft projects on my plate and I thought it would be nice to make a comeback with a wintery wedding-related post.

Enter the project.

I'm going to recreate the photo below to build our altar. I got the idea from a picture someone had pinned from a cute little blog called "Garage Sales R Us".

While I like boxwood just as much as the next person, they don't say "winter" as much as evergreens do. I also wasn't sure what kind of fabric was being draped through them in the photo, so I improvised.

I went to a flower warehouse out in Lancaster County and picked up three evergreen wreaths - one large and two small.

They're pretty boring all by themselves, so I thought I would give them a little "something-something" to make them go with our wedding decor. We're getting married in an absolutely stunning barn and the decorations will be rustic, woodsy, and wintery. I'm learning that there's a very fine line between wintery decorations and Christmas decorations...so I'm treading carefully.

I picked up some pinecones from around my property and dried them in the oven at 200 degrees for about an hour. Those that were closed opened up and the sap dried to a pretty amber resin. I also had a strand of juniper and some extra snowy pieces of greenery.

I started with a piece of snowy greenery. I took a strand of floral wire and cut it to about 4 inches long,

wrapped it around the piece,

and used it to snugly wire it into the wreath.

After doing some fluffing, it blended right in!

I alternated snowy pieces with juniper and pinecones.

After a few hours, 3 discs of The Big Bang Theory, and several scratches on my hand, all three wreaths were finished!

Didn't they turn out just beautifully? I'm so happy with them! I've always liked the look of mixed greenery and I just about nailed the style I was going for. It's wintery without looking like Christmas.