Post by astudyinscarlet on Jan 1, 2021 12:44:20 GMT
I made these for my christmas model of the month entry but I thought it would be nice to post them here too. These are my Julip sized christmas wreaths, though obviously you could make something similar for other things too by using different colours and finding different sorts of ribbons, beads or charms to add to them, maybe just a more winter-themed one or other seasonal ones, or easter, halloween, etc.
This is Fly-by-Night, Belina and Percy modelling them (with Dylan the dog):
I made them big enough to fit around the horse's necks but one of them is currently on my yard's feed room door and you can add hanging ribbon or cord to them if you want to hang them up somewhere else.
To make these I used:
dark coloured pipecleaners
wired dolls house foliage (some holly, some ivy)
metallic/tinselly pipecleaners
beads (metallic plastic ones and some coloured)
fancy ribbons (approx. 6mm wide)
silver embroidery thread
dark green embroidery thread
plus I also used an embroidery needle which was big enough to take the thicker thread but narrow enough to fit through all of the beads
The foliage is for dolls houses, it's sold in long strands of wire covered in little leaves which are Julip scale. I think you can also buy wired foliage that is a bit more like tinsel with just the green strands, no leaves, which would also work well. Or you could use green pipecleaners if you can't get foliage or the tinselly pipecleaners (like Dylan has round his neck) if you want something more sparkly for the base. Or maybe if you have an old fake christmas tree or full size wreath or something similar that's being thrown out you could even cut sections of that and trim those down to make wreaths perhaps. You could also perhaps use plain wire wrapped in yarn for a base or if you're only making one to hang up rather than to put round a horse's neck you could make the base circle out of card and then wrap that or stick things to it. You could use sparkly or other fancy yarn instead of or in addition to the foliage or tinsel and also for decorations you could use things like sections of broken necklaces or bracelets, buttons, charms, shapes punched out of fancy or shiny paper or thin card (you can get a lot of tiny paper punches online), mini pom-poms, pieces of foil scrunched up into balls, tiny MDF shapes and all sorts of other things.
The base is made from pipecleaners twisted together into a circle. If you're making these for horses then the base circle needs to be somewhat bigger than you might think it needs to be because when you add the foliage and everything it will decrease the internal size a bit. Try to make sure the ends of the pipecleaners are well tucked in so there are no sharp bits sticking out. I then wrapped the wired foliage around this several times. If you use the stuff with leaves you will likely lose a huge number of leaves in the process. I guess you could try sticking those on afterwards with glue but after wrapping the pipecleaners a few times enough leaves stayed on to make the wreath base look decent so I don't think that is necessary. Maybe just save the loose leaves for some other project though.
The blue wreath and the red wreath have tinselly pipecleaners then wrapped around over the foliage. The silver one has silver thread wrapped around it instead.
The bows are 6mm ribbon glued on. You can buy pre-made little bows but it's not really that difficult to make them, just more time-consuming. If you tie a bow on it probably won't hang right although if you want a more rustic wreath that would look fine but if you want something a bit neater you need to make the main part of the bow, the tails and the section of it that wraps around the wreath in separate pieces to get it to hang right. Wrap a short piece of ribbon around the wreath where you want to position the bow first and glue this on. Then make the main section of the bow - make a sort of flattened figure of eight using the ribbon (so that either side of the '8' stick up slightly but it's flat in the centre), glue in the centre to keep it in shape and then wrap another short section of ribbon around the centre and glue it around the back. You should then have the main bow. Cut the two tails in separate pieces and stick these on top of the ribbon section around the wreath, and then stick the main bow on top of those.
The baubles are assorted beads which I then attached by stitching through the wreaths using a fairly thick, blunt embroidery needle (I don't recommend using a regular sharper needle for this) and embroidery thread (the thread colour ideally needs to match the base colour of the wreath unless you're deliberately going for contrast by using something like silver thread; Percy's wreath does have silver thread to attach the baubles but I used dark green on the other two). This was fairly easy to do even with a blunt needle as the foliage doesn't wrap that tightly so there were plenty of gaps to stitch through. You can usually buy lots of mixed/assorted beads in all colours or in particular colours online, on ebay for instance, reasonably cheaply if you don't have any already. You could glue them on if you can't stitch them on but that may be a little messier but if you are using some other decorations instead of beads you probably would have to glue those on (hot glue would probably be best in that case).
And that is pretty much it. (To hang them on a door I just made a simple roughly S-shaped hook out of wire which slots over the top of the door and then the wreath slots onto the bottom of the hook, and obviously you can add a loop of ribbon or decorative thread if you wanted to hang them up also.)
This is Fly-by-Night, Belina and Percy modelling them (with Dylan the dog):
I made them big enough to fit around the horse's necks but one of them is currently on my yard's feed room door and you can add hanging ribbon or cord to them if you want to hang them up somewhere else.
To make these I used:
dark coloured pipecleaners
wired dolls house foliage (some holly, some ivy)
metallic/tinselly pipecleaners
beads (metallic plastic ones and some coloured)
fancy ribbons (approx. 6mm wide)
silver embroidery thread
dark green embroidery thread
plus I also used an embroidery needle which was big enough to take the thicker thread but narrow enough to fit through all of the beads
The foliage is for dolls houses, it's sold in long strands of wire covered in little leaves which are Julip scale. I think you can also buy wired foliage that is a bit more like tinsel with just the green strands, no leaves, which would also work well. Or you could use green pipecleaners if you can't get foliage or the tinselly pipecleaners (like Dylan has round his neck) if you want something more sparkly for the base. Or maybe if you have an old fake christmas tree or full size wreath or something similar that's being thrown out you could even cut sections of that and trim those down to make wreaths perhaps. You could also perhaps use plain wire wrapped in yarn for a base or if you're only making one to hang up rather than to put round a horse's neck you could make the base circle out of card and then wrap that or stick things to it. You could use sparkly or other fancy yarn instead of or in addition to the foliage or tinsel and also for decorations you could use things like sections of broken necklaces or bracelets, buttons, charms, shapes punched out of fancy or shiny paper or thin card (you can get a lot of tiny paper punches online), mini pom-poms, pieces of foil scrunched up into balls, tiny MDF shapes and all sorts of other things.
The base is made from pipecleaners twisted together into a circle. If you're making these for horses then the base circle needs to be somewhat bigger than you might think it needs to be because when you add the foliage and everything it will decrease the internal size a bit. Try to make sure the ends of the pipecleaners are well tucked in so there are no sharp bits sticking out. I then wrapped the wired foliage around this several times. If you use the stuff with leaves you will likely lose a huge number of leaves in the process. I guess you could try sticking those on afterwards with glue but after wrapping the pipecleaners a few times enough leaves stayed on to make the wreath base look decent so I don't think that is necessary. Maybe just save the loose leaves for some other project though.
The blue wreath and the red wreath have tinselly pipecleaners then wrapped around over the foliage. The silver one has silver thread wrapped around it instead.
The bows are 6mm ribbon glued on. You can buy pre-made little bows but it's not really that difficult to make them, just more time-consuming. If you tie a bow on it probably won't hang right although if you want a more rustic wreath that would look fine but if you want something a bit neater you need to make the main part of the bow, the tails and the section of it that wraps around the wreath in separate pieces to get it to hang right. Wrap a short piece of ribbon around the wreath where you want to position the bow first and glue this on. Then make the main section of the bow - make a sort of flattened figure of eight using the ribbon (so that either side of the '8' stick up slightly but it's flat in the centre), glue in the centre to keep it in shape and then wrap another short section of ribbon around the centre and glue it around the back. You should then have the main bow. Cut the two tails in separate pieces and stick these on top of the ribbon section around the wreath, and then stick the main bow on top of those.
The baubles are assorted beads which I then attached by stitching through the wreaths using a fairly thick, blunt embroidery needle (I don't recommend using a regular sharper needle for this) and embroidery thread (the thread colour ideally needs to match the base colour of the wreath unless you're deliberately going for contrast by using something like silver thread; Percy's wreath does have silver thread to attach the baubles but I used dark green on the other two). This was fairly easy to do even with a blunt needle as the foliage doesn't wrap that tightly so there were plenty of gaps to stitch through. You can usually buy lots of mixed/assorted beads in all colours or in particular colours online, on ebay for instance, reasonably cheaply if you don't have any already. You could glue them on if you can't stitch them on but that may be a little messier but if you are using some other decorations instead of beads you probably would have to glue those on (hot glue would probably be best in that case).
And that is pretty much it. (To hang them on a door I just made a simple roughly S-shaped hook out of wire which slots over the top of the door and then the wreath slots onto the bottom of the hook, and obviously you can add a loop of ribbon or decorative thread if you wanted to hang them up also.)