Tea Wreath

A here with another great DIY gift idea!  This one is for the tea drinker in your life.  You know, the one who likes to knit scarves by the fire surrounded by a harem of cats (just kidding, Goose).  Anyway, this wreath is a festive way to keep those tea packets at the ready and not stashed away in the back of the pantry.  To make it you'll need:

• 24 packets of tea
• 24 wooden clothespins
• A leftover box from a full-size frozen pizza
• Patterned papers
• A way of drawing/tracing circles
• Scissors
• Hot glue
• Paper glue (Elmers or Scotch archival glue work great)
• Ribbon

I started by tracing the outside of a dinner plate onto the pizza box.  I then measured how wide I wanted my wreath by laying one of the clothespins on the box with the "clip" part outside the outline and marking the back end of the clothespin.  From there I figured how big the interior circle needed to be, marked the center, and used a compass to make the interior outline.  Then, using household scissors, I cut out the ring of cardboard.

Once you have the ring, it needs to be covered in paper.  For this I laid the ring on the backside of a piece of 12x12 scrapbook paper and traced both the outer and inner ring.  I then cut out the paper leaving approximately 1/2" of paper on either side of the outline.  This 1/2" is then clipped into "fringe" so that it can wrap around the back of the cardboard ring.

I then laid the cardboard ring on top of the paper ring and began gluing the fringe to the back of the cardboard using paper glue.  The process looks something like this:

Once I finished, it wasn't pretty on the backside, but the paper was securely attached:

On the front however:

So much prettier than a pizza box!

The next step is to make the tiny paper strips that cover the clothespins.  For this I used a rotary cutter, but scissors can work too if you're patient and want to measure it out.  Each piece was measured to the exact width and length of the clothespins I was using.  Please measure your clothespins to get the dimensions, as there might be slight differences depending on brand/style.  Then the paper strips get glued to the back of each clothespin using paper glue.

For the next step, you may want a ruler and calculator...or you can be impatient like me and just eyeball the placement of the clothespins on the wreath.  Heat up your hot glue gun and get to work adhering the clothespins, making sure the clip part is facing to the outside of the wreath (this sounds like a no-brainer, but trust me, it's easy to get moving and not pay attention).

Once you're done it's time to add ribbon or string/yarn of some sort to hang the wreath from.  I folded my ribbon in half, slipped the folded end through the center of the wreath and pulled the two cut ends through the folded part so ribbon encircled the width of the wreath between two of the clothespins.  That's a lot of words to say that it looks like this:

Now for the fun part!  Add your tea bags!  I clip them from a corner so the wreath has a spiky shape, but have fun and experiment.  The colors of the bags definitely make a difference, so play with that as well.  The fun part is that every time you use up the bags, you can change the look of the wreath by changing the tea!

If you decide to jump on this project, it's super cheap and fun.  Let me know what yours looks like by posting a pic or two below.  I think I'm off to have a cup of tea before bed ;)