Guys, I’m not as crafty as I like to think I am. I’ve admitted this before but here I am attempting crafts again. I’m either stubborn or stupid (who am I kidding, of course I’m stubborn!). Last year my Mom made a craft request for a Christmas gift and apparently she liked the decorative ‘S’ I made her enough to request another craft this year. This years challenge? A burlap bubble wreath. Yeah, I had no idea what that was either. But after she showed me her inspiration images (here, here, here, and here) I figured it was doable. I had trouble finding a tutorial, but then came across this one which I used for the materials list and not much else. I seem to be on a crafting trend where I look up lots of inspiration pictures, read several tutorials, and then disregard everyone’s advice and do whatever I want. This may be why I never like any of the crafts I do…

But I think this wreath turned out alright.

For this project I bought:

a 24″ wire wreath frame (I lost my receipt but I think it was $10-$12)

2 rolls of 6 inch wide 30 ft long burlap ($6.99 each)

a roll of thin wire ($1.99) – I only used about 12″ of this so don’t buy a whole roll, just borrow some from a friend

hot glue gun and sticks – I used my mini low temp hot glue gun

wood cut outs (lost my receipt but I think all three were less than $10)

2 little bottles of paint ($1.99 each) – I didn’t use much but I was out of black and white so I had to buy these new

All in all after coupons I spent just under $40 to make this wreath.

If I were making this wreath for myself I would have been able to make it much faster but since I was making it for my Mom and I was unsure of exactly what she wanted… I questioned a lot of my choices. I could have made this in an hour, but it took about 2 hours spread out over two days.

The reason this is only ‘sort of’ a tutorial is because it’s really easy, but very hard to explain. So here is my best attempt to explain something simple yet hard to put into words.

The wire wreath frame I used was sort of curved, which you may be able to see from the picture above. Also, the burlap came in a roll so it was curved as well. I tried to work within those curves to make my job easier. So basically I just stick loops of the burlap up through the back of the wreath frame, I also twisted and turned about every other one I looped through to give it a more layered look. Like I said, it was very simple to do but hard to explain.

Side note: burlap smells awful! I mean, seriously awful! I’ve never used burlap before so I was surprised by that. Thankfully the smell faded over time, or at least I got used to it.

Here is the back of the wreath after I was finished:

I did not use any glue or wire in this process. This is just the burlap and wire frame.

I actually like it plain like this, but the inspiration images my Mom sent me all had stuff on them like fake flowers, initials, and bows. I wanted to get a large ‘S’ for our last name but I couldn’t find what I wanted to so I grabbed a fleur-de-lis and a small ‘J’ and ‘S’ (everyone in my family has a ‘J’ first name). I also couldn’t find a cool looking ribbon so I made my own.

You can probably follow my process in the last few pictures but basically all I did was lay out a strip of the burlap, painted it white, freehand painted black chevrons, and let it dry. It has the imperfect, rustic look that a lot of her inspiration images had. When it dried I cut it in half and started playing around with it (the burlap is 6″ wide so after it was cut it was about 3″ wide).

This is the part where I have no idea what I’m doing haha. Then I got a little crazy and cut my ‘ribbon’ into strips…

The “bow” under the fleur-de-lis I attached with a little glue from the hot glue gun and I also stitched it with the thin wire I bought. The fleur-de-lis is glued on.

The strips that I stick around the bottom right are just stuck in through the wire frame. The ‘J’ and ‘S’ are glued on.

And that is how I made a huge burlap wreath for $40!