I am planning to make a gift for three of the teachers at C’s school for Christmas this year. One is a crayon wreath for her classroom teacher, one is a special gift that I can’t say here because it’s for my mother in law (who teaches in the classroom next to me daughter) and there is a slight chance she will read this. The last is for the other teacher in that little corner with C’s class, who is a good friend of my mother in law and always brings the girls gifts. Mme J is the only one who C says is as fancy as her, so we wanted to make her a gift that meets her fancy factor.
We were seeing some tulle or tutu wreaths around and decided that was pretty fancy. (It was between that or a feather boa wreath, but we had already made a feather wreath for C’s class for Halloween.) We went to Fabricland, and got 2m of white tulle, 1m of grey tulle (I wanted silver but they did not have any so I will show you how I handled that later), and 1/2m of red tulle. It cost $2.50 a meter, but with a membership, it was 25% off, so it was not a pricey project!
I started by cutting all of my pieces into 6″x3″ rectangles. I should say they were all somewhere around 6″x3″. Tulle is not the easiest thing to cut straight, especially when you are impatient like me and want to cut 8 layers at once. It really didn’t matter in the end, and maybe even gave it more shape and texture. So if you are making one, don’t be too picky on your cuts.
I decided to use an embroidery hoop as my base, mainly because I had some halves leftover from my crayon wreath (which used just the insides of two different size hoops). I also wanted the thin inside ring. If you google or do a pinterest search for tulle wreaths you will see some have very thin inside rings (done on hoops) and some have a thicker ring (done on a styrofoam ring type base).
I looped two pieces at one time. I started with two white, and then went one white and one grey, with the white over the grey so it was lighter (because I couldn’t get silver as I mentioned above).
The trickiest thing to remember (which isn’t that tricky once you get going) is to make sure you loop them the same way each time. Otherwise, you will end up with this…
Not so good. I knew I wanted my pattern to be mostly white and silver with some red, so my pattern went white-silver-white-red-white-silver, and repeat.
I didn’t use nearly all of the tulle, but I was glad I had bought extra just in case – there is nothing worse than running out half way through a project. I think I used about 1.5 meters of white, 1/2 meter silver, and 1/4 meter red.
As for the embellishments, we are not quite sure what we will do yet. I think we will make a fancy J monogram with some rhinestones. Then, I found this Christmas wooden sign at the dollar store, and when I put it on the wreath, it looked great!
I’m still not sure if I will leave it there of put on a fancy J (so it isn’t exclusively a Christmas item) but that’s still up in the air. What do you think, Christmas wreath or year round?
Erin Klein says
I’ve awarded you: http://www.kleinspiration.com/2011/11/i-am-happy-to-receive-this-award-from.html
April says
Very pretty!