DIY Christmas Wreath - Frugal Upstate

Believe it or not, decorating your own wreath really isn’t hard at all! And when you do it yourself, you can have exactly the size, shape, color and style that goes with your decorating scheme.

Walmart asked me to try decorating my own wreath with supplies in their Holiday section and a budget of $20. I used the simple “Make It” directions in the Holiday flier:And created my own DIY Christmas Wreath!

Normally I’m very traditional in my Christmas colors. Red, burgundy, or dark green with highlights of silver or gold. But I wanted something a bit different this time-I wanted something that I could leave up on my front door to bridge the gap after Christmas is over but before you can decorate for the spring holidays. I’m tired of my porch looking so sad and plain after all the holiday decorations come down.

I bought just a few items, sticking to silver, white & blue as an “icy” winter theme. A few silver picks, an faux evergreen wreath, a large snowflake and some silver and white wired ribbon. One of the neat things Walmart has done this year is to add QR codes that you can scan with your phone that will bring up ideas on how to use the various holiday crafting items in projects!

The first thing to do was to make the wreath itself look a bit better. It needed some serious “fluffing”. It really does make a big difference as you can see in this photo:

It’s my job to fluff the branches of our artificial Christmas tree each year, so I’m kind of an expert 😉 The key is not only to pull the branches out, but also to give them a bit of a curve at the end. A real tree has the tips of the branches reaching up to the sun-when I fluff out the branches of our tree I make sure they always point up just a bit, it makes a HUGE difference in the end look. The greens should look like this:

Next I added the silver picks into the wreath. Walmart had a huge selection of different picks-I stayed just with the silver ones. To secure them on the wreath I just wrapped some of the branches around to hold them in place, but you could use some floral wire to hold them more securely. I wanted to leave room for a bow at the top, so I placed the picks at the 2, 4, 8 and 10 o’clock positions on the wreath.

Of course you could just buy a bow-Walmart has plenty of lovely full bows-but I decided to make my own. I cut the silver ribbon into 3 lengths and made three loops:

I simply stacked the three loops on top of each other, added the long strips for the tail and then used a staple to hold it together. Then I took some silver thread and tied it on the wreath. I draped and attached the tails of the bow through the rest of the wreath.

I attached the snowflake in the center. It’s a bit high in this picture-I retied it to hang lower later:

It still looked a little bare so I added in some white glass ornaments:

Tada! Easy peasy! And it will look fantastic on my front door all winter:

Of course if you aren’t in the DIY mood there are lots of beautiful pre-decorated wreaths available:

Along with tons of other great Christmas decor items. I especially like all the great color coordinated sets of inexpensive ornaments you can find–it really doesn’t take a lot of money to add a lot of impact for the holidays!