My mom might proclaim that this is a little more frou-frou than most of my other DIY projects and door decor. As in floofy. As in fluffy. As in that it’s one step away from wearing a doily apron and having curlers in its vines. Maybe this is all an exaggeration, just a little more Kirkland’s than I usually sway. I’m not usually so holiday-centric in my home decor either, especially when it comes to super-sweet, love-focused, country-chic, and lovey-dovey items, but, well, I like the V-Day. And hearts. And I always like natural materials. And because it’s February, I officially consider it V-Day season.
What I’m getting at is, I made a new wreath.
The cute painted pinecone wreath that I made pre-holiday-season did just what it was supposed to: held strong and looked pretty from Thanksgiving through New Years without so much as a dropped cone. With a new holiday on the horizon, off came the old, and up went the new.
Materials:
- As many free grape vines as I could get.
- Twine.
I busted into my collection of vines (graciously harvested by my Dad last fall) and set out to make something sweet and new, something particularly heartsy-fartsy.
I started by unraveling all of the vines and removing the dried leaves and ganglier shoots by hand. With a simple snip-snip of the gardening shears, I chopped them apart into pieces of equal length (obviously if you try this, use your own judgement on how big you want the heart-y heart to be… mine were 26″ pieces).
When I had what seemed like enough pieces of trimmed vine to create a semi-voluminous structure (used all that I had, except for the already perfectly round wreath that was in the pile), I tied the ends together and slowly began to force the branches into a rounded shape.
There was crackling. There was squeaking. But nothing broke. I took it slowly, and by the time I had them torqued around to a single point at the bottom of the heart and tied together, the branches were feeling semi-compliant with my request of them. Even still, I harnessed down those heart-lumps with twine to force them into a permanently curved position to hold their form and stay nicely rounded.
To further train the dried out vines to hold this specific shape, I misted them with water in the basement and left the wreath bound flat to dry overnight.
In the morning, it was looking pretty good. Still heart-y and flat, always a win when you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Hung on a hook, it continued to hold it’s form.
So I unbound it. And nothing shifted. Hurrah!
I neatened up the string ties that still hold the branches together, and hung it on existing hook on the door. That’s about as lovey-sappy as I’d like the front door to look. No additional treatment required, although I did consider painting one of the vines on each heart-half pink to pop a little. A subtle pink infusion wouldn’t have been rejected if I had considered it sooner. That’s an idea you can run with instead.
I’m kind of digging the scale of the heart; it’s happy and enormous, almost the full width of the door. Because it’s only made of a few vines, it’s narrow too, so it’s not protruding out far and getting smushed by the storm door.
It’ll do for a few weeks, because the holiday is officially around the corner. Cute heart happiness.
Any sappy-love door decor happening at your pad?
Comment
Very Cute. I’ll have to ask my father-in-law to keep some vines from their little Western NY home vineyard.