White Wreath

With the advent of Pinterest, I have found so many wonderful projects I've wanted to try my hand at: the latest being a white pine cone wreath with red cardinals. Isn't this beautiful? I pinned it from Diedre's Simply Simplisticated blog. Her's was incredible too.

I already had collected a few pine cones used in my autumn decor last month; but not enough for a wreath. So I ventured out to my backyard where we have over 20 pine trees; I knew there were plenty of pine cones just waiting for me out there!

Only I had forgotten one important thing; it had snowed and my treasures were now completely hidden from view under a blanket of white... so I was only able to gather a few that had fallen on the tree boughs.

* Sigh *

Then I realized my cones were not elongated like the original.  

Oh well...

I had already picked up white spray paint, three cardinals and some red berries at Michaels, so I was determined to still create something.

Using a wreath base I found at Goodwill, here's my version:

I will admit this wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

After about four or five coats of white spray paint (spraying everything in a box in the basement since it was -30 with the windchill outside), I gave up... the cones and wreath were just soaking the paint up and not turning the nice bright white I wanted. I finally resorted to hand-painting the cones with watered-down white acrylic paint to get them looking white - ish.

And because I made the mistake of painting them BEFORE I assembled it, my hot glue was not adhering correctly; the cones were falling off once the glue hardened.

Gad.

Thank goodness I just bought a whole new tube of E6000 glue - it did the job after I held the cones in place for a few minutes to set.

The birds and berries were just wired into the wreath, and a wire was attached to the top for hanging.

I do like the partial wreath design; my take but not a direct copy of the Pinterest inspiration.

Hopefully if you want to make one of these beautiful decorations, you'll learn from my mistakes!