Valentine's Day Wreath

For the last couple weeks I've been hard at work on this Valentine's Day wreath. I knew I wanted to make a felt rose wreath so I picked up some sheets of felt at Hobby Lobby. I decided to go with a multitude of colors and was excited to see that some were available in glitter. The sheets were four for $1 (glitter sheets were two for $1). Here are the colors I chose. Because of the pricing I got four each of the non-glitter (red, white, hot pink, dark red, light pink, and pink) and two of the glitter (white, pink, red).

I followed a felt rose tutorial I'd found on Positively Splendid. She said petals should be about 1.5''x2'' so I found an oval shape in Word and re-sized it accordingly. I'm horrible at cutting circles and straight lines so I needed something to trace.

I used a ruler to cut out the center strips since they should measure 1''x3''.

I traced all my petals with my design (I decided to do eight) and cut everything out.

Here is my first felt rose.

Once I knew I could make the roses I began the arduous task of tracing and cutting. This took me hours. I did all the tracing in one night and cut about one to two colors a day and it took me about a week. I've seen some beautiful felt rose wreaths out there and didn't really believe the crafters who made them when they said it was hard but it IS! OMG so hard. But so worth it. I just kept looking at the pretty finished one and willed myself to keep going. The result was a bruised and battered hand though. But, I should have known better. A) I didn't own fabric scissors and B) my scissors were for right handed people. This has been fixed as I have now purchased left handed fabric scissors. The picture on the left is the traced petals and the one on the right is all my roses made.

Here is a comparison of the white felt rose and the glitter white felt roses. As you can tell, there isn't much of a difference. If I were to do it again, I wouldn't bother buying the glitter ones.

All the different felt colors had different textures. For example, the dark red was too thick and the pink was too thin (I ended up not using the pink and will save them for another project). This resulted in some roses not turning out as nice as others. The hot pink and red had the best texture and came out with the best roses. Here are all the colors I decided to use.

So I started the easiest task - gluing them on the wreath! I just went around in a circle on top then did a circle around that on the inside and again on the outside. I had just enough roses! I was left with one leftover red and two white.

Here it is finished! Isn't it perfect for upcoming Valentine's Day?

 Here is a 2013 update:

Another view:

From the other side:

I just love this wreath! Looking back, I am so happy that I made this. The time and effort I put into it was totally worth it knowing that I'm going to get years of use out of it!

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