Felt circle wreath

I am very thankful for my friend Cindy!

Every year, around this time, for the past 9 years she has offered to take my family's Christmas picture.  Check out her great work here.

I try to find a cool location, and this year we planned on taking our pics on the front porch of an old, abandoned house.  Kinda cool, but could be kinda creepy.

So I decided we needed a prop to lighten it up a bit.  I settled on a red wreath made from 250 felt circles.

It was just the right touch.

Here's how I did it...

I recycled my wreath from halloween (plucked off all the purple feathers and ping pong eye balls)
1 yd. red felt (I think I might go get another half yard to fill it in a bit more)
a cup with a 3 inch diameter (or however big you want your circles to be)
a stamp pad (I used yellow to show up on the red but not be too dark)
scissors (make sure they are comfortable because you will be cutting a lot of circles)
pins

The first thing I did was fold my fabric in half, so I would get two circles out of each cut.  Then I stamped the outside of my cup and pressed the circles onto the felt.  Yes, it's a lot of circles.

It really only took me an hour to cut them all, but my hand was a bit sore from the cutting marathon.

When you are ready to start pinning them on, you fold each circle in half...

and then in half again.  You will get this little rosette...

And then you just start pinning them onto the wreath.  In any order, but nice and snug.

Start clustering them together, and then you can fluff them after you are done.

Here's a small section so you can see how they start to come together.  And here is the finished product, nailed (shhhh! don't tell anyone) to the front door... I suppose I should have gotten a closer picture of the wreath, but I was dealing with 3 cranky kiddos at the time and we had a long photo shoot ahead of us.  I also made a white, felt circle wreath last year that I'll post a picture of later.  They are just so ruffley (new word?) and fun!

I can't wait 'till I get the pics back from Cindy.  I got a sneak peak on Sunday, and I am so excited about the vintage country feel.

Now I just need to figure out what kind of card for this year.  (I'll show you our cards from last year on Tuesday.  They were really fun to make!)

Happy Thursday Everyone!