Fun Christmas Freebie

 Crafting for Free or very Little

Christmas Star Wreath

This is a great project to do with the children or craft group Ideal for decorating a hall or community room and everyone gets the pleasure of being involved.

If you and your crafty friends have saved last years Christmas cards (doesn’t every crafter) here is a lovely wreath to make that will add lots of colour to your room.

Start by cutting all the cards into stars, I used a set of nesting 5 point star dies with stitched edge but if you do not have this you can use a 5 point star template and pencil the outline and cut out by hand. This takes a little time but you get to frame the parts of the card that will be the prettiest to use. So I have a Happy Christmas star for the top of my wreath and some lovely robins in smaller stars for the edges, as well as general winter scenes. I had my stars prepared as I cut and stored them when I took the cards down. So I selected a few larger stars and a lot more medium stars that had coordinating colours. Mainly traditional Christmas red, white and green. 

Next I cut a large circle from some greyboard, again if you do not own greyboard, cereal boxes will do the job, just cut 2 and glue together to make a firmer wreath. I cut my first circle of card with a craft knife to cut into the board and then scissors a to finish the job. I then found a smaller item to pencil around for the smaller circle. I cut a cross in the middle with my craft knife and then cut from the cross to  the inner circle to get it started and then used my scissors and knife to cut round. 

Once I had my base wreath, the size of the wreath has been determined by the size of the grey board or cardboard you have available, you need to wrap the circle with ribbon. I had some lovely linen/flax ribbon that I had purchased very cheaply at a car boot, just because it was cheap and I knew it would come in handy sometime.

 I went around the base wreath evenly layering the ribbon until it nearly met and then stuck the ends down with tape. This would be the bottom section of the wreath.

I then took my stars and started laying them out over the wreath. There is a trick to getting stars to stand out and that is using a ball tool or scoring tool between the top and bottom of each point on the star, and fold in to make the star stand 3D. 

Flat star before scoring

Scored star now 3D

Once you have your stars all laid out as you want start gluing them to the wreath base. I found it easier to get my layout by adding the larger stars say 5 or 6 around the frame and then overlapping the smaller stars to fill in. I add my stars with a hot glue gun but you could also use silicone glue especially if you have little ones helping and you do not want them using a hot glue gun. 

Once these are firmly in place add a finishing bow to the bottom I used the same natural linen ribbon I had put around the wreath base but added another level with red sating ribbon, adding another piece of the red ribbon to the top to enable the wreath to be hung. 

Here is my completed wreath hanging on my front door, to give you an idea of the finished product. All this has cost is the glue and ribbon. 

You could also decorate the wreath with paper flowers 

Cones made from Book pages etc

I am. Sure you will come up with more ideas and if you save other greeting cards you could make an autumn or spring wreath cutting leaves instead of flowers or stars. 

Happy Crafting

Dee