Feeling Bookish

Two weeks in the new job and I am loving working and being helpful to others!  Before I started, I felt the need to decorate my office (since to a crafter, this is almost as important as the job itself!).  I made a wreath out of a vintage atlas of coordinates I found at a thrift shop.  Here is the finished product!

Now here is how I made it!
1. Tear out several sheets of the book.  I used 25 sheets for the larger outer ring and then 20 sheets of the smaller rolled paper for the two smaller rings.
2. Roll the larger rings by starting in the top left corner of the paper. Continue the roll until you have the edge of the paper wraps around the side.  Take a hot glue gun and secure the edge of the paper with the glue.  I don't recommend tape, since I had a hard time getting this to stick. Complete this with all of your large cone pieces.

3. Cut a large circle out of card stock.  This will become the base that you glue your cone pieces to in order to make the wreath.

4. Place your cone shaped pieces of paper together with the smallest ends facing each other centered on the piece of card stock.  This should allow you to form a circle out of the pieces.  Pick a piece up once at a time and hot glue them to the circle base.  Once finished, you will likely need to glue some of the pieces to each other to give more structure to the overall wreath.

5. Start rolling your smaller cones.  You will start in the same top left corner and make a tighter roll (see picture).

6. You'll want to glue these pieces together with hot glue as well, being sure to make sure it is glued together from top to bottom (see step 7 and it will make sense!)

7.  You'll need to cut the small cones into a 2/3 section and 1/3 section respectively.  If the piece is glued from corner to corner, then it won't fall apart when cut.

8.  Not start your pattern with the 2/3 cut smaller roll.  These were staggered between the larger pieces between the cones and hot glued down.  Don't worry if there is a little space in the center of the circle that has a gap- it will be covered by the pleated circle piece.

9. Take the 1/3 size pieces and stagger in between the 2/3 pieces, making sure to make the circle smaller as you go.  Hot glue these down.

10.  Create a pleated circle for the center (a tutorial on how to do this are included in my next blog!)

11.  Glue your pleated circle to the center of your wreath.

12. Add any additional touches to the center of your circle.  Here, I took two fancy flower punched pieces (one in a black and white typeface and the other on glitter paper) and layered them under a bottle cap and vintage button with twine.

13.  Finally, glue a loop of ribbon to the back of the wreath.  I glued mine along the spine between two of the paper cones.  Now you are ready to hang and enjoy!