So raise your hand if you haven’t seen the ornament wreaths that have been popping up everywhere online! Anyone? Well, I made one too!

We hang our wreaths inside so they don’t get smashed in the screen door. Besides, then – as Max says – we get to look at it all day!

So, starting out I thought all you needed for this project was a wire hanger and cheap ornaments. We added some bells to give it a little festive jingle. To this list I would now add pliers, a hot glue gun, and ribbon of some sort.

Funny story, when I initially wanted to start this project I went to the closet for a wire hanger and we didn’t have any. They were all destroyed in the Great Hanger Purge of 2010….I finally found one that had escaped by hiding inside an empty hanging garment bag. Strange. I’d never really considered that the implications of removing all the wire hangers would extend into my crafting.

Funny story two: it is really dark in my house. Like, lights on during the day, back of a cave dark. On a purely practical level, this makes good sense since 9 months out of 12 sunlight is NOT something you want in your house here because it will increase the temperature by 20 or 30 degrees. As far as taking pictures goes, though, this is REALLY annoying. That picture of the ornaments up there? That was taken during the day (cloudy, but still), two feet from a big window, with 300 watts of light bulb on directly above it, then digitally lightened in GIMP and it STILL looks like I took it in the middle of the night.

Annoying. I can’t wait to move to a house that doesn’t have built-in light exclusion features.

Anyway, round out the corners of your hanger and bend off the hook and twisty bit. I just sort of straightened mine, I’d recommend bending it into a nice circular shape before you start adding ornaments, because you don’t want to be trying to bend hanger wire through your ornaments: they will likely pop off their loops. Enter glue gun.

(I am not making this up. There is light out there! It just can’t get into our Cave of Darkness.)

Anyway, once you’ve added your ornaments and wiggled them around so they fit closely together, you’ll need to close your hanger loop.

Enter pliers. Argh, now I remember why I hate wire hangers so much. To help cover my tracks I glued some green ribbon over that horrible, horrible join.

Then I used last year’s clearance Christmas ribbon and the glue gun to make a giant bow to cover it.

Fun, happy, festive, cheap, and (except for bending that darn hanger together) easy! I like it.