Fall Grapevine Wreath
I really dig the look of grapevine wreaths. They’re such a great blank canvas for whatever you want to do with them. Since we’re not quite to Halloween and it’s not technically summertime anymore (even though where I live it’s still in the 100’s outside) - I wanted something fall-ish on my door. I keep seeing the coffee filter creations that folks are doing on Pinterest and knew it was time to try it out myself. I ended up spending right around $7 on materials and just LOVE the way this wreath turned out.
My original plan was to completely cover the grapevine with the coffee filter flowers so I dyed a LOT of coffee filters. But after I made a big old flower out of each color, I decided I only wanted one of each on the wreath. And now I have spares to do another project with!
In case you’re interested in making one for yourself - let me show you how I did it and what I learned about dyeing coffee filters.
What You’ll Need
- Grapevine wreath (can be found at most craft stores and some secondhand stores - look for coupons - I got mine for $5)
- Coffee filters (I had these on hand, but you can usually buy 200 or so at the Dollar Store)
- Acrylic paints (again, I just used what I had on hand, but these are very inexpensive and can be picked up for under $1 without using a coupon)
- Ribbon or String (for hanging the wreath)
- Disposable cups
- Plastic (kitchen trash bags worked fine)
- Straws (or something else you can use as a stir stick)
- Hot Glue Gun
- Stapler
How to Do It
I started this project by dyeing my coffee filters using watered down acrylic paint. I have a stash of acrylic paint so I went and picked out colors that represented fall to me. Then we squirted a little bit of paint in a disposable cup and then added water. I used the straws as stir sticks and dunked the coffee filters in the watered down paint mixture.
Before I pulled them out, I gave them a quick wring-out (might want to wear gloves for this step - I didn’t and my nails were stained for a few days). I stacked them by color on the plastic trash bags I had laid out on my back patio. The problem I had when they dried out was that they tended to stick together as one big lump of coffee filters. Luckily, I was able to re-wet them and pull them apart, but it was a bit time-consuming.
The next time I dye coffee filters, I’m going to rig up a little drying station with a bit of string and some clothes pins - that way they can dry separately. They dry really fast so it’s a project you could work on a little at a time if space was an issue.
The next step was to take the wreath and attach the ribbon to it so it could hang on the door. Like I said before, I was planning to cover the wreath so I needed to attach this ribbon before I started gluing on the flowers, but with the way the wreath turned out, this step could be done before or after the flowers.
Once your coffee filters are totally dry - you get to make the flowers! Super easy and super fun…for those of us who like to squish paper in our hands anyway. I took four coffee filters and stapled them twice in the middle. The stapler I have at home is kind of a short one so the staples are nowhere close to the middle of the filters, but it made no difference. Actually doing it this way made for a nice flat bottom on the flower so they were easy to glue on the wreath.
Take the first filter and scrunch it up with your fingers.
Now take the second one and do it again.
And again…now you’ve got your flower!
Here’s a shot of the underside of the flower so you can see the nice flat surface the staples created. It made it so much easier to glue onto the wreath than when I’ve done projects using actual silk flowers.
Here’s a flower in each of the colors I created. These flowers look great when you use different colored filters together too!
And finally I glued them onto the wreath using my hot glue gun. I put a nice big glop of hot glue onto the bottom of each flower and pressed it onto the wreath. Making the flowers and gluing them onto the wreath took 15 minutes in total. It was super fast!
I really adore the way the wreath turned out!