Christmas Bow Wreaths

Many of you know that Alberto and I love making wreaths…and the holiday season always gives us a good excuse to make new ones for the house. We came up with the idea of using Christmas gift bows a few years back and decided to revisit them while walking through our local market and found bags full of them. They were all so shiny and colorful that we couldn’t resist…now, all we needed was a few styrofoam wreaths and the glue guns, of course!

Here’s what we used to make the wreath:

• 18-inch foam ring
• 2 12-inch foam rings
• 4 bags of Christmas bows
• 8 yards ribbon

This is what we needed to put it together:

• Glue gun
• Pins

Let’s make a Christmas Bow Wreath!

• Select the colors that you want to use to make up the wreath. We decided that we wanted the hunter and lime green bows with white and silver.
• Define a pattern for adding the bows to the foam ring. I find that this helps you stay on track with your wreath. For the larger wreath, we wanted it to look a little more random, so the pattern was four rows, alternating between 5 and 4 bows in each row.
• Beginning with the first row of the pattern, place glue on the back of the bow, and place it on an outside edge of the 18-inch ring. Be very careful with the hot glue so that you don’t burn yourself! (as we did, many times during this project)
• Take the next bow in the pattern, add glue to it, and place it under and between the first two bows, working your way towards the center of the ring.
• Continue adding the bows working from the outside edge toward the inside of the ring until the entire wreath is covered. As the rows begin to slant, just add a few extra bows to bring it back in line.
• Once the ring is covered with bows, take smaller bows (shiny red ones, in our case), and place them randomly around the wreath like berries.

Cocktail Break!

Although our Christmas wreaths this year are green and white, the pattern we chose reminded us of candy canes. This inspired Alberto to think of peppermint and chocolate. (Not surprising since his favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip!) For our cocktail this weekend he decided to take Godiva white chocolate liqueur and peppermint schnapps to come up with this wintery blast of flavor. I have a feeling that this will be a holiday classic for years to come! Here’s the recipe…

Variations on a Theme!

While we were making the smaller rings, we realized that we didn’t have enough bows. So what do you do when you don’t have what you need? You improvise! We decided to take some of the ribbon that we had bought to hang the wreaths, and use it as part of the smaller wreaths!

• To begin the smaller wreaths, count the number of bows that you have left, and divide by two so that you have the same number of bows for each wreath.
• Randomly place clusters of bows using the method above on the smaller rings. Keep in mind that you’ll be wrapping the ribbon around the ring in a slanted pattern, so let that guide your placement of the clusters. Also save some bows to fill in empty spaces after you wrap the ribbon.
• Pin one end of the ribbon to the back of the ring, and wrap it through the ring until you come back to the starting place (approximately 5 times). Don’t worry about covering bows or trying to cover all of the empty spaces. You can adjust the ribbon and add more bows later.
• Cut the ribbon, and pin the other end to the back of the ring.
• Now, adjust the ribbon around the wreath so that it looks natural. You may want to tuck the ribbon in and around some of the bows.
• Where there are empty spots, glue the leftover bows to the ring to fill them.
• Finish them by adding your little shiny red bows.

I don’t know which wreath I like better, the large one or the two smaller ones with the ribbon. I find that sometimes our so-called mistakes turn into some of our better projects. These are really cute wreaths, and they were super easy! A perfect addition to our holiday season!