Hot Glue, Coffee Filters & Third-Degree Burns: The Tale of a Halloween Wreath

I’ve been itching to make one of the ubiquitous coffee filter wreaths for ages now, but laziness stood in my way. Now that the mercury has finally dipped below the triple digits (on some days, anyway), I’m feeling a little more inspired to tackle some holiday projects. Before you start protesting that it’s INSANELY early for Christmas, let me share a little spoiler: this wreath is getting Halloween-ified (and yes, I’m aware it’s insanely early for that, too).

Using this tutorial from The Nester, I grabbed a wrapped raffia wreath from Michaels, along with 300 extra-large coffee filters from the grocery store. Then I whipped out my glue gun and got to work. I’ve got to admit, I had some serious doubts along the way.

You know, like after the 10^th time I scorched my hand on the glue gun, and I started verbally assaulting the glue gun. Or when I realized that I’d been gluing coffee filters for the better part of two hours, and all my hard work looked like this:

Gulp.  I kept plugging in spite of my initial alarm, and finally had a super fluffy (but slightly uneven) wreath.   

My handy dandy kitchen scissors fixed the uneven part, and I was thrilled, if a little worse-for-the-wear. Before you get to daydreaming about Christmas and sugarplum fairies, though, try this equation out for size: After lots of fluffing (and a little patting myself on the back, if I’m going to be entirely honest), I decided the Halloween wreath needed a mantle to match. So I shopped around the house, relocating some branch candleholders from our dining room and trading out my neutral books from some black tomes. I also wrangled my Halloween feather trees and added them to the mix.

Next up on the Halloween DIY list: some decorations for outdoors! Have you tackled any Halloween projects at your house?

Centsational Girl’s Autumn Crafts Party