2020 Front Door Bling, or How I Made the Dresden Wreath

I saw the Dresden Wreath on The House of Lars's Instagram and I loved it so much, I had to try making it. I finished it around Thanksgiving, in time to go up when we got our tree. I loved this project. Below are the deets re: my experience making it.  The tutorial is here.

My first task, per their directions,  was to create a circular "form" by wrapping 5-6 strands of wire around a cylindrical lampshade and connecting the strands by wrapping a smaller wire around those every four inches or so. The form felt unstable and limp, but I laid it on my table anyway and moved to the next step. (Looking back,  if I'd reshaped a wire hanger or used thicker wire for the form, it would've been better; the pictures on their tutorial look like their circular form was firmer and thicker vs. a bunch of bundled wires together). 

I've only done about four things with my Cricut machine since I got it for Christmas a few years ago. So each time I use it, it's  like re-learning what to do. Once I watched some simple tutorials like this one, I bought the files on House That Lars Built, uploaded them to my computer and then to the design space, fed the gold sheets of card stock into the Cricut and then punched them out. (I did feed about three sheets in when my machine was set to vinyl so those cuts didn't go all the way through the card stock-oops. I still fed them in again so as not to waste those). 

If you look at the original wreath in the House That Lars Built post, they didn't cram as many shapes onto their wreath. She said she only used about 5 sheets of the card stock. I  used about 8 sheets. Once the shapes were punched out, I affixed thin golden wires to the back of each using small neat squares of packing tape vs. hot glue, (my hot glue sticks were at school) and then bent them through the strands of wire in the wire form. This was done over a few days. 

When I hung it on my door, it sagged because the wire form didn't have enough rigidity to it. I needed to attach it to a firmer circular shape because there was no way to add wire to make the original circle firmer. I thought about buying a gold ring (14-16") but found an embroidery hoop in my closet and used its' inner wooden form to give the wreath more shape. Thankfully the wooden round was disguised behind all the shapes and though it was 14" and the wreath was more like 15.5", I just bent/gathered the sections that sagged with more wire. I didn't use every shape in the template-there were camels and deer, for example. One thing I wish I'd done was to add the bow to the top. Within the design space you can enlarge certain shapes if you want and I'd played around with making the bow bigger but then never ended up cutting it out. 

I was pretty pleased with how it turned out, despite minor glitches here and there. It's a fun new holiday decoration! Definitely worth making. 

Looks so different depending on the photographic filter!