DIY Grapevine Wreaths

After church a few Sundays ago, I just sat in my pew to think of ways to decorate in the church for our wedding.  Each Christmas, our church hangs wreaths on the walls.  I decided wreaths would be a great (and simple) way to decorate.

I originally decided on 10 baby's breath wreaths.  I've seen them before, and they just look really beautiful.  There are 20 spots for wreaths in the church, but I felt like we could put one on every other hook since baby's breath wreaths are generally very full.  

I talked to a few people and found out how expensive baby's breath wreaths are and then decided that I had to come up with a plan B.  That plan became grapevine wreaths.  My dad grows muscadines, it was time to cut them back, so it worked out perfect!  

It started out that we were going to make 10 wreaths as I said before.  I then decided on 12 (two extra, just in case).  I then changed my mind and thought that since grapevine wreaths are smaller and darker than baby's breath wreaths, that we needed to put one on every spot instead of every other.  This upped our total to 20.  When we started making them, I remembered about making 2 extra, so it became 22.  So, what started as a simple 10 wreaths became a mildly overwhelming 22.  Luckily, I had Ryan (who did not appreciate this jump in numbers, haha), and Chris (a man that works with my dad sometimes) to complete this daunting task with me.

We had a hard time finding any really good DIY posts about how to make them.  The only one we found was at this website (http://gardentherapy.ca/diy-grapevine-wreath/).  We used parts of this blog, but found that we had to change a few things to make it work for us.  So here it is, how to make a grapevine wreath:

1.  Cut grapevines (I assume other vines would work as well) and put them in a stack.  As I said, my dad grows muscadines, so we were lucky and had some right in the backyard.  Our vines varied in length, just make sure they are long enough to wrap into the size circle you want.  It is ok for them to be longer, but not shorter.

 We had about 3 stacks this size to make all of our wreaths.

2.  Cut the small twigs off of the larger vine and place them in a stack for an individual wreath.  We left a few of the small curly twigs.  I decided they added a little personality.  We put about 13 vines in each of our wreaths.  Some had a couple more or less, just depending on the thickness of the individual vines.

My handsome fiancee cutting twigs 

3.  Put all of the ends from a stack together.  We put some of the thick ends with some of the thinner ends so that one side of the wreath wasn't a lot thicker than the other.

4.  Have two people hold opposite ends of the vines.  Have one person twist the vines tightly so that they will all stay together when you put them into a circle.

5.  Once the vines are twisted, pull the opposite ends together to make a circle.

6.  Use wire to help keep the ends together in a circle.  I assume that we will be able to cut the wire off once the vines dry out, but this will help keep them together until then.

7.  Use the extra pieces sticking out to twist around the wreath.  This helps everything stay together, thickens the wreath, and (most importantly) looks really neat!  Once you come to the vine's end, you can just stick it into the existing wreath.  We also chose to use some of our smaller vines to stick in the wire, running in the opposite direction and twisted them that way to even the wreath up.

8.  Voila!  You're finished!!

Hopefully this is clear enough.  Feel free to comment with any questions!  

- Cali