I started with a crummy novel I bought at a Borders that was going out of business. Once I got it, I realized that I'd already read it, and not only that, but I hadn't even enjoyed it that much. So it seemed like a good choice for this project. I soaked the edges in coffee (to give an oldish look), and then put it in the oven at ~180 degrees for a few hours to dry out.
I made a cardboard wreath shape to serve as the base; I just traced around my cake taker for the outside and around a salad plate for the inside.
For the first layer of pages, I folded them accordion style and stapled them all around the outside of the wreath (you can see them peeking out from the bottom in the picture). Then I flipped the wreath over, and attached pages I'd wrapped into cone shapes in a couple of layers on top of the bottom layer. I put similar (but) smaller cone shapes around the inside. This left a weird space between the cones pointing inward and the cones pointing outward, so I attached some more accordion folded pages to the middle (in the picture below I'm partway through that step). I used hot glue, and it worked great.
This is what the wreath part looked like after all these steps; nice enough, but not quite colorful enough for my taste. It also wasn't quite round, so I hoped to obscure that with some additions.
I decided to make a bunch of felt flowers to put on it to brighten it up. As ever, the internet came to my rescue with gems like this and this and this and this. I made five flowers and some leaves and tried them in a bunch of arrangements on the wreath. I finally settled on just using four so I have one extra felt flower for a future project.
So here it is! A fun fall wreath. I was going to hang it on my front door, but we never come in that way so I decided to hang it inside where I could see it. You guys have any fun fall crafts in the works?
