One of my projects for our upcoming bridal shower is a pair of doily wreaths. I read several tutorials and finally settled on the style I thought would be the fastest. (I’m like water: I take the path of least resistance.) Here’s my take on how to make a doily cone wreath.
My wreath was inspired by two tutorials: this one from Miss Mustard Seed and a variation of that tutorial from Home Is Where the Boat Is. I combined the best of both, applied doilies to their techniques, then added a second layer and a center frame. My almost 8-year-old helped so much with this project — it’s a great one to do with kids.
Doily Cone Wreath Supplies
- 16″ circular cake board
- 10″ circle doilies (I got mine at Party City. You’ll use almost the entire pack of 56.)
- Hot glue gun
- Pen
- Plastic cup (for tracing your circle)
- Circular frame, 3″ diameter (Michael’s dollar section)
- Scrapbooking paper
Doily Cone Wreath Instructions
1 – Use your plastic cup to trace a circle in the center of your cake board. The diameter should be about three inches.
2 – Using a box cutter, cut a slit in the back of your cake board. I forgot to do this until the end, so I don’t have a photo of this step. It’s much more of a pain to do this at the end. (Irony alert: Miss Mustard Seed warned to not do this, and I went right ahead and did it anyway. Twice.)
3 – Roll your doilies into cones. Grace handled this for me. I was really amazed at her ability to consistently turn out cones that were the same diameter. She just started by rolling a very tight bottom with an open top and continued until the entire doily was rolled up. You want the opening at the top at have a 1.5″ diameter (roughly).
4 – At this point, Grace handed the cone off to me and I hot glued the final bit of doily to the cone. (To state the obvious, do not let your children handle the hot glue gun.) Just keep your hot glue on the solid part of the doily to avoid burning yourself.
5 – When you have 29 cones for the bottom layer, use Miss Mustard Seed’s technique of placing four cones in North – South – East – West positions. You’ll glue the cones around the circle you drew in step 1. Lay down a line of hot glue from the circle to the edge of the cake board. Then, add your cones with the fold up.
6 – Fill in your cones, one at a time in each quadrant. Learn from my mistake: don’t put the points of your cones too close together or you’ll wind up with a big gap like this one in the second photo. (Don’t worry, you can disguise it later.)
7 – For the second layer, we made 16 cones. (We probably could have used 18 cones to eliminate some of the larger gaps.) We used a different technique for applying the cones. I put the first cone in between two cones. Each subsequent cone, I layered the point over the point already glued down. Squish those points down flat as you go. You can see the overlap build up in these photos.
8 – My two red frames came from Michael’s. I chose them for the diameter, the cost ($1 each) and because they are very lightweight. Pop the paper out of the frame and use it as a guide to draw a circle on the back of your scrapbook paper. (I had to make two.)
9 – Cut out your circles.
10 – You can decorate the inside of your frames however you like. I wanted to use my Silhouette to cut a couple’s monogram of the bride and groom’s initials. But the monogram was jut too small and those thin areas of the letters broke apart when I tried to lift the monogram off. Oh well — sometimes you don’t know until you try.
So instead I just cut out hearts from white cardstock. Pull the stand off the back of the frame. Hot glue the frame to the center of your wreath and you’re done.
I’ll snap some {better} photos of the wreaths at the shower to share with you. The wreath hanger I could reach in my storage room is too short for this wreath, so this may look a little off, but you get the idea. 🙂
So pretty! And you can even change the center accent to suit a different holiday, season, color scheme, or whatever. 🙂