Summer Wreath and Mantel {tutorial}

Do you go through periods where you are super inspired to do projects and then other periods where you feel burned out and don't want to do anything?? I do. Yesterday I felt super inspired. And I am an impatient crafter. When the feeling strikes, I dig around and find whatever is in my cupboards to make a project.

I was looking at my mantel and I really wanted to make it look

"Beachy" and "Summery".

So I went out in my garage "stash" and found some grapevine wreaths from the Dollar Store. I decided to use the small size. Then I found some black and white pinstripe material. And I crafted up a quick summer wreath with things I had laying around.

This is a 15-minute project.

Here's what I did:

I cut a long piece of the pinstripe fabric 2 inches wide.

Then I wrapped it around the grapevine wreath. I wrapped it pretty tightly and overlapped it so that it was pretty cushy with material.

I secured the end with my trusty glue gun.

Then I took the material and cut a long strip that was 4 inches wide. And I folded it in half and ironed it so it was flat. So now the material is 2 inches wide with a closed end.

I folded the material in pleats, into a flower shape and hot glued in between the pleats. Then I hot glued the flower onto my wreath.

I did the same thing to make two smaller flowers, except instead of a folded 2 inch width, I cut a 2 inch section of fabric and then folded and ironed it so that the folded width was 1 inch.

Then I glued those two fabric flowers on each side of the bigger flower.

I covered two big buttons with fabric and attached them to the smaller flowers.

Then I hot glued a star fish to the bigger flower.

That's it!! SUPER simple and fast AND inexpensive.

Then I set about making my mantel more "Summery" and "Beachy". I got out my glass covered vases and put vintage doorknobs inside of them.

And I talked my son and neice into spray painted an old frame beachy blue for me. I also took a rope bag that I had kept from Target and "framed" it in between an embroidery hoop. I also did this with some doilies.

I made a canvas pennant banner that I thought looked kind of beachy.

I'm not going to show you the whole mantel today though, because I just decided that it needs one more element.

I have a project in mind that I think will be perfect. I'll work on it today. You know when you finish a project and it just doesn't feel complete. That's how I feel about the mantel. I need to work on that last element.

So until then, here's my partially finished Summer Mantel :)