It's Hot! Hot! Hot! ... must be time for Christmas crafting

Phew! How hot has it been this week?!  Rather inconveniently though, our boiler clearly didn't think it was quite hot enough and decided we needed all the radiators to be scalding hot too ... all day long! Cheers ... thanks a lot.  Thankfully, the engineer is coming with a new part on Monday, so hoping to have dropped two dress sizes by then! Ha! If only ..

So, as it's shaping up to be one of the hottest weeks of the year so far, what have I got to share with you this week? Yes, that's right, a tutorial for a Christmas crafting project....  What? .... We have to start early to get it all done in time!  

You could of course, make this in pretty summery colours and hang as a summer flower wreath, if the thought of the 'C' word is just too much to bear in July!

This was an idea I saw on The Charmed Home and immediately knew I wanted to give it a try.  For the flowers, I followed the method described over on Pink Paislee, using some Anna Griffin 12" x 12" Christmas papers I had in my stash and I cut the flowers on my Cricut machine rather than hand cutting, but you could equally use any flower template and simply draw around and cut out.  I cut these at 4.5" and got 4 on a page.  You will need 24 of these in total - I used two sheets each of three different designs.

Once you have your 24 flower shapes, gently scrunch them up to give a slightly vintage look.  This will also to help soften to paper which will make it more pliable and much easier to shape in the following steps.  Then, on the back of each flower, secure a large brad in the centre with a glue dot.  I already had the large brads in my stash from an old HOTP kit but if you can't find any I suppose you could get away with buttons at a pinch.

The next part is the trickiest bit as you need to take care not to rip the paper as you form and manipulate the flower.  It is obvious that I am speaking from experience here?  (You will also now see the point of the scrunching beforehand!).

Gather the flower around the brad and secure with a small elastic band.  The kind used for kids hair are great but I used a packet of Loom bands which are all the rage at the moment with the kids and were only £1 in Hobbeycraft and just the right size. Don't worry about the colour as you won't see these when finished.  Then, carefully open out the flower and straighten out the legs of the brads to hold in place (if you are using buttons you obviously won't be able to do this so you would need to make sure the elastic band is tight enough to secure without tearing the paper), turn over, and gently work and shape as desired.   If you do happen to tear the paper, (this did happen to me on a few of them), don't worry - it just adds to the vintage look!

Repeat with all the others until you have 24 completed flowers.  Now you can either leave them just as they are, or decorate/ bling them up to your hearts content!  I added some glitter glue to the edges of mine and also gave them a couple of coats of Spray & Shine to give them a slightly glossy finish and also make them a little more robust. 

Next, take a medium sized polystyrene wreath (I got mine at Hobbeycraft, £3) and wrap with ribbon, securing the ends with hot glue.

Finally, arrange and glue on all your flowers, again using a hot glue gun and they are not called HOT for nothing so take care not to burn fingers ... not that I have ever done that ... walks away whistling), leaving space at the top to add a large ribbon bow.   Secure some more ribbon to the back in a loop for hanging, or you could use florist wire.

et Voila! 

* Given our wet and windy winter weather in the UK, I would obviously only hang this on an internal door. 

Thanks for stopping by and hope you all manage to keep cool in the heat ... If you need me, I'll be sitting in the fridge until Monday!

TTFN

Bev x