This Christmas I tried my hand at making a wreath of paper oak leaves for my mom. While I've made a fair few leaves from crepe paper, I'm an absolute beginner to wreaths. Cue research, experimentation, and a healthy dose of winging it. In the process I also learned a valuable lesson about handmade gifting: I'm no stranger to frantically finishing handmade gifts, but this year was particularly crunchy and I finally decided to cut my losses and gift it in "kit" form. That gift to myself paid dividends - one less thing to do in the pre-holiday rush, and an excuse to spend a few quiet hours crafting with one of the most important people in my life. The result: a beautiful FO imbued with the memory of quality time well spent.
Technique: Leaves were made using techniques learned in Lynn Dolan's workshops using Carte Fini metallic gold crepe paper. I freeform cut the lobes on the leaves to get more variation so the leaves would be more natural-looking. Each leaf was glued to 20ga floral wire cut into 4-5inch lengths (I purchased floral wire from Save on Crafts and cut each wire into thirds). To make the wreath, I affixed the leaves to a 12" macrame hoop (h/t to Lia Griffiths' Metallic Paper Wreath tutorial for the idea) by wrapping the stems with gold crepe and then wrapping them to the wreath form.
New skills: Mounting leaves to a wreath form. Working with metallic crepe paper.
Lessons: The metallic coating causes glue to take much longer to dry, and is more susceptible to tearing while wrapping. For the leaves, after I glued along the seam I let them set overnight to give the glue more time to adhere.
I ended up using about double the number of leaves I estimated, luckily I'd planned on making 2 wreaths so I didn't run out.
What I'd do differently: Next time I'd like to try adding acorns, and maybe using fewer, larger leaves. I might also experiment with laminating gold and copper crepe using fusible webbing, although I'd proceed with caution given my challenges with glue and metallic crepe.
