BREAK IT DOWN
• COST: $0-$5
• EFFORT: 1 out of 5
• RESULTS: 3 out of 5
When we first moved into our home, there was a wreath of faux berries on the front door. It wasn’t my style so I took it down, and that’s when I realized the terrible truth about front door wreaths: they can wreck your paint job.
We live on top of a very windy hill, so any outdoor decorations need to be extremely secure, otherwise they’ll get blown around and potentially sent crashing through a window.
Our enormous wooden planter for next to the front door? It crashed over dozens of times — sending a thundering echo through the whole house — no matter how much weight we stuck inside the bottom.
Our porch bench, which is made from our kids’ old crib? It’s super heavy but the wind has still sent it skidding across the deck boards.
The only reason our DIY hanging baskets (made from wood and filled with faux greenery) are still intact is because we hung them with wooden posts instead of rope. The wind up here is seriously fierce.
I learned my lesson when it comes to most wreaths because the wind would rattle them violently against the front door — scraping and chipping the paint off. In order to preserve my paint job, it’s been easier to skip the wreaths.
Then I came across two lonely strips of cream-coloured faux fur when I was tidying my sewing area. They were leftover from when I’d recovered a footstool a few weeks back. I held them up and remembered that lately I’ve been seeing a lot of pictures of door wreaths made from soft, fluffy faux fur.
“Fur wouldn’t scratch the paint!” I thought immediately, deciding that I probably had just enough to make a wreath. But what would I wrap it around? I certainly didn’t have a plain wreath form hanging around, since it had been years since I’d tempted the wreath fates.
I wandered around my cluttered DIY zone for a while, looking for something circular that I could wrap the fur around. Cardboard? Nah. A frame? The square shapes didn’t look right. Then I found an embroidery hoop and knew it was perfect. I was even able to clamp the end of one fur strip inside the hoop to get it started.
I wrapped the strip around the hoop over and over until I came to the end of it, and then I used a needle and thread to stitch it together so it wouldn’t unravel. I stitched the second strip of fur to the end of the first and continued wrapping the hoop, and I had just enough to get back to my starting point. A few more stitches to secure that one, and the whole hoop was neatly covered.
I found some cream-coloured ricrac to make a loop around the top of the wreath and tied the ends around the black doorknocker, and the wreath was finished.
While it’s true that the faux fur might not hold up in a bad rainstorm, this decor didn’t close me anything so I don’t mind if it’s only up for a month or so. It’s nice and soft against the painted coral surface of our front door so I don’t have to worry about it chipping the paint. The cream-coloured fur is fun and wintery without being Christmas-specific, and it’s nice to see something on the door again after years of my self-imposed “wreath ban.”