A Heart-y Wreath!

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp and Show Challenge is "A Project With Heart".  As you may have read here a post or two ago, this year I want my Christmas to have more of a hand-made feel to it, so I decided to make this wreath.

I don't know about you, but I like nothing better than finding a new and unlikely use for one of my stamps.  In this case it's the heart stamp from Tim Holtz's "From the Heart" stamp set.  If you squint and look at it in just the right light you could almost swear that it's an ivy leaf, and that was where the inspiration for this wreath came from.

The Retro Grunge card stack is one of my favourites (I'm onto my 2nd one), and the back side of several of the pages have great distressed greens, perfect for the leaves.  I traced around a plate to cut a big circle from a sheet of card stock and then cut out the centre, leaving a two inch ring to use as the base.  (I didn't trace around anything for the middle, the leaves hide any wobbly cutting so it's no big deal!).  I found a set of battery operated red led lights in my local pound shop (or dollar store if you prefer) and used my crop-o-dile to pierce 20 holes around the base to feed the lights through then taped all the wires in place on the back side.

Next, I stamped lots of hearts and cut them out.  Did I say "lots"?  I mean "LOTS" lol.  I swiped some with Tarnished Brass distress stain for a little variation and then fixed them in place with my ATG gun, at various angles, making sure to hide any wire showing from the bulbs, just leaving the tip peeking out.  The berries were cut from white card with a circle punch, coloured with Festive Berries distress ink used a Black Soot distress marker to add a calyx (ooh, science!).  Finally they were given a coat of Glossy Accents for extra shine.

The ribbon I had was too bright so I gave it a good soaking with Aged Mahogany distress stain to knock the colour back a little.  I twisted some wire through the back, used my craft pick to pierce a hole at the bottom of the wreat and fastened it in place.  And there you have it :)  I'm really pleased with it, it looks great with the lights on, now all I have to do is decide where to put it!

Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com

Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!