A Novel wreath....

​In the past few years I've traveled a great deal for market purchases for the shop. Along the way, I found a lot of themed wreaths made form book paper which were both impressive, beautiful and all all-inspiring in the world of wreath making. So, I decided I'd put myself to work and create one, or in my case a few for the shop with my own twists. Here is a quick list of what you would need to make these beautiful wreaths. I've sold a few at my retail shop. I hope you enjoy my little project!
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What You’ll Need to Make a Book Page Wreath:
-A Box Lid
-Pencil/Pen Scissors
-Compass  
-Floral wire for hanging your wreath
-Hot Glue Gun
-Tape: Masking or Clear
-An Old Book 
-Patience... this wreath took me 2.5 hours to assemble

I've used novels and dictionary style books. Both are equally beautiful. My examples, I've used an old novel style book with deckled edges. I wanted pages with as much text as possible so I was careful to pull pages with a lot of text. You can see in my finished wreath, I used a text page with a large photo. I liked that it didn't all matchy matchy... But of course that depends on each individual. If you don't have any old books laying around to take apart? I scouted out garage sales and thrift shops for old books.  Take care what kind of book you are buying as well . . . You just never know what you may read on those wreaths ha-ha.  Now that you have pages you want to use, tear carefully out of the binding. I was really lucky on most of my books, the binding was broken and it was easy to pull the pages out of the glued spine. 

To begin the wreath, start hot gluing your book page cones to the base. Just take an edge of one of your pages and begin to roll them into a cone like shape. My wreath example used about 120 sheets of book paper. When rolling your cones, I found it easy to tape your cones with either masking or clear tape. Preferably on the back side that will not show. I also used hot glue as I became more comfortable with the process. I'm kinda accident prone, so this took some time. ha ha. Sure enough, It took me a few tries to get a system going to get my cones identical so I suggest doing all your cones first...  to help the process. My example wreath was about 10". Overall finished: 15" wide.

To keep things symmetrical when beginning wreath assembly, I glued the cones at the 3, 6, 9 & 12 of a clock. It was just a starting point and I think I did move one along the way as you sometimes find you may need one here and there to break the gap. The time clock example will just give you a good start if your doing this for the first time.  As you finish your first layer, you'll want to start adding more cones, layer and build in the same pattern fashion but now you'll be using 2,4,8,10 clock positions to make an even/uniform look. Don't worry if you're not exactly uniform. Its the beauty of this type of wreath. As you start layering you'll notice that the cones will be too long as you begin to build inward towards the center. Don't worry... you can trim the edges to keep them away from the center. Or if you're like me, I flattened the tips and glued them down to help create a center platform for the center rosettes.

Definitely experiment with your wreaths. I used things like German Glass Glitter and old broken ornaments during Christmas to create a beautiful Holiday scene in my shop. You can also create paper rosettes which I incorporated in the center of the example wreath. When making my rosettes, I also used glass pearls for the center of each rosette, Swarovski crystals on the pearls and lastly sprinkled glass glitter around the tips. Little things can give such a big impact on your wreath creations, so experiment and have fun! 

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