With apologies to T. S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock, I cannot measure out my life with coffee spoons because I don't drink coffee. Recently, however, I measured out a couple of days with coffee filters.
For the last several years, I have hung a white feather wreath on our dining room mirror at Christmastime. Loved that wreath; I got it at a local gift shop long before feather wreaths were at the big box stores and everywhere else. With each succeeding year though, the wreath got a little more bedraggled. This year, I decided sadly that I really shouldn't bring it back out. What to replace it?
I liked the look of some of the coffee filter wreaths I've seen on Pinterest, and it sounded easy, so I got the supplies and got to work.
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| coffee filters, glue gun, glue sticks, old t-shirt, scissors, straw wreath |
No matter how good my iPod playlist is (and, honeychild, I have some good stuff on there), there is a limit to how long at one sitting I can fold and crunch filters and burn my fingers with hot glue, so it took me part of two or three days to complete my wreath.
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| wrapped in t-shirt strips the inside edge of glued filters |
I'm not going to write a tutorial since there are scads of them online already. I will just say I used a fourteen-inch straw wreath, which I wrapped with strips of old t-shirt, and about 280 filters. I started out trying to place the filters in rows like the tutorials suggest, but I wound up just sticking them in as close together as I could, which no doubt explains some of the finger burns.
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| back of the wreath |
After I had glued on as many filters as I could, I trimmed the edges slightly, but my wreath is not perfect. It's kind of cockeyed, which suits me just fine as I'm a bit cockeyed myself. I initially planned a ribbon hanger wrapped around the wreath, but soon scrapped that and filled the entire thing with filters. I attached a length of ribbon to the back with straight pins and hot glue. I used one of those cool 3M Command hangers directly on the mirror. In years past, I took the mirror down and hung the feather wreath from a ribbon taped to the back of the mirror. The 3M hook was so much easier -- love that!
For those of you who have been wondering why I haven't posted lately, I have indeed been busy, but I had also run out of photo space (again!) on Picasa. I am now trying a Flickr account. I hope this will be the ticket.
