PaperArtsy: Winter Rose Wreath

Hi everyone, another little festive project today from Darcy.

This was so relaxing to make, and I can't wait to hang it up. I chose to go with traditional colours, but you could do this in any colour scheme.

I started with some satin fabric and some lacy fabric, both cut into strips that were about 1.5inche wide. . .I then painted the satin fabric with Old gold fresco paint. If you look carefully, you will see that I only painted down the middle of the fabric, leaving the edges white.

Then I mixed Hey Pesto with a little water in a small spray bottle, and sprayed the lacy fabric. Once covered I then added Holly fresco to the spray bottle and sprayed it in random places, so the lacy fabric became two-tone. Once dry I painted the little raised bobbly bits using Claret.

Now I had my base fabrics, I took a polystyrene ring and started to wrap. I overlapped the fabric as I wrapped, and secured with a dab of hot glue. Now you can see why I only painted the centre of the fabric, I wanted to fray the white edges to add a little more interest and as highlights.

I then added a layer of the green and red lacy fabric in the same way.

Now for a quick late night wander around my garden...no I couldn't wait for the next day...so snip,snip,snip and I had some twigs. I rubbed the little blobby end bits with Ruby Treasure Gold and then wrapped them around the ring. Because the twigs were still fresh they were quite bendy and easy to manipulate. Again I secured them with hot glue.

To finish off the base, and also to trap the twigs, I added a length of braid. Again just wrapping around and securing with hot glue.

Now to make the roses. I scrunched up some wax paper, sponged it with Nougat and then brushed on some Treasure gold. From this I cut out several flowers using the medium flower die. I also cut some from heavy smoothy card, I used several Christmas stamps to cover the card flowers. I stamped on both sides.

Now all I had to do was build up the rose, I used alternate layers of wax paper and stamped card.

I found this video from Leandra really helpful in how to cut the layers so that they fit together.

In total I made 5 paper roses. Depending on how big your polystyrene base is then you may need to make more. Though remember you went to all the trouble of painting and creating the layers underneath, it would be a shame to cover them completely.

My final embellishment is a bow. I knew I wanted red, and I wanted velvet.. but of course I didn't have red velvet. So I took the lilac velvet that I did have and I sprayed it with red pepper Adirondack spray ink. It took a while to dry, but turned out really nicely coloured.

I then stamped the bow from EDY03 using black Stazon ink.

I folded my piece of velvet in half, and added a little polyester wadding between the layers. I then used my sewing machine and some gold thread to outline the bow. I wanted to be able to cut the bow out without it fraying and falling apart, so I used a close zig-zag to make a satin stitch around the outside edge.

Now I could glue it all together. I started by deciding which bit of the ring I wanted at the top. I glued a loop of braid to the back, and the bow to the front.