WHAT?! It's already October?!

That's the feeling I've had waking up the last three days. Where has this year gone?! It's true what they say, you know.... the years get shorter the older you get. So if that's the case, I better start preparing for Christmas now- its only 3 months away!

So that's what I did. I created a Christmas wreath out of book pages. Librarians beware in this post, because I defaced a pretty amazing author just to get make a pretty cool book wreath. There are a number of templates for this particular project. I got my inspiration for this project from this one but ended up going a completely different route. Here's how it ended up:

What you'll need:

1. Book(s)-preferably old ones that are missing pages or already discolored.
2. Hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks
3. Cardboard to cut into a circle the size you want your wreath to be.
4. Ribbon 
5. Something to put in the middle- Here I used small Christmas bulbs in various colors. I originally thought to put a picture in the middle, but really anything can be used here. 

Possible Modifications:

• You can also use a foam wreath like what is used for floral arrangements
• Some tutorials suggest spray painting the edges of the pages before ripping them out in order to give a more ancient feel.

We were having a book sale at the Cornelius ReStore when I started this project so I grabbed one of my favorite authors, William Shakespeare, and thought his words would be appropriate for this project. 

Next I cut out a small circle from a cardboard box. Your circle can be any size. The larger the size, the more pages you'll need to complete your wreath, and the more time consuming the project will be. 

Then I drew a smaller circle in the middle to represent the opening. You can also cut this out and have an opening, but I knew I wanted to fill mine with Christmas decorations so I chose to just leave it.

Next I tore out a page :O ! and rolled it up so that it looked like an ice cream cone. I used one small dab from the hot glue gun to secure my page into its cone shape. I tried to do this so that my back layer would have a larger opening and my front layers would have smaller openings. Each cone looked like this:

Then I glued each cone down in a circle onto my cardboard wreath. I was very careful not to leave any space between cones. This ultimately ended up in a "squishing" of the following cone layers. I think next time I'll leave some space between each cone.

After I had three layers all the way around my wreath, this is what it looked like:

I glued down a piece of a page that I thought would make an interesting center piece and then changed my mind. This is what I decided upon:

Again here I just used the glue gun to glue down miniature Christmas ornaments. I took the hooks off the top, flipped them over, and arranged them how I saw fit! Super easy center piece. 

Then I took a piece of ribbon and used a stapler to connect it on the back and voila!

Again, here is the finished project: 

I have plans to do another one of these wreaths (please don't tell the librarians!) very soon. This time I will be sure to use pages that don't have any color on them (the orange is driving me crazy!), and I'll probably do it while watching a chick flick since it is pretty time consuming.

Have you tried doing one of these before? I'd love to see how yours turned out!