Personalized, Mossy Wreath

I drink wine. Sometimes, quite a bit. Since we started making wine last year, that usually means that we have corks everywhere. And lots of them! Since they can't be re-used to cork our bottles, we've been collecting them for other things. Inspired by a Pinterest pin, I set out to make a personalized wreath for our front entrance way.

Ignore that missing cork, ok?

At the time I started to make this wreath, winter was just starting, so I was itching to keep a little greenery around. In my opinion, moss is one of the most comforting types. It's soft and fluffy! The dollar store has bags of dried moss (and some tiny twigs mixed in), so I bought a few. But, to be honest, those little bags are stuffed pretty well, so I could have easily just bought one.

Using some leftover cardboard packing material from my daughter's new daybed, I carefully cut a giant "J" and affixed some moss to the form with hot glue. When hot gluing this moss, be very careful of your little fingers - moss isn't very dense, so there are deceiving gaps where the glue can peek out and burn you!

Sweet, sweet dollar store moss.

 At Value Village, I was way too excited to find a set of embroidery hoops for 99 cents ("excited" and "embroidery hoops" probably don't belong in the same sentence together). So I hot glued the mossy "J" to a hoop and got to work gluing a bunch of my collected corks around the rest of the bare hoop. Luckily, our wine store still uses real cork and not the composite ones. The true cork has such a nice texture and smell.

Again, at the dollar store, I picked up some gold-threaded ribbon to make an accent bow and tucked a little faux apple in the knot for some colour. The apple actually fell out of a Christmas decor box while we were moving stuff around in the basement - I take these omens seriously! Because, I am weird. Let's call it "quirky". So, on the wreath it went.

A word of warning when working with this mossy stuff: it gets everywhere. Since it is really just made up of lots of tiny bits, expect some "shedding" when you move your project around.