DIY Football Burlap Wreath

As much as I hate to say it, football season is upon us! My husband is a huge football fan so I have to embrace it. I also have a 12 year old brother who plays football and has been for 6 or 7 years. This year he is playing for The Patriots and their colors are red and blue. I have been on a wreath kick lately (Candy corn tulle wreath, anyone?) so I thought I would make a cute burlap wreath for my mom’s door for football season.

I searched and searched for a good tutorial and none of them made sense to me. NONE. So I basically was starting from scratch. Enjoy 🙂

Supplies:

*Wire floral wreath – Mine was 18 inches ($3.99 at Hobby Lobby) and I had JUST enough burlap to cover it all. So if you want it fuller than mine, I would go with a size or 2 smaller. Or more burlap.
*3 rolls of burlap. If you don’t want color, then do all brown. I went with brown, red and navy blue to match the colors of his team. 5 yards of each (or 15 feet of each) The chevron was 4 inches wide and wire edged which really helped in the end. The brown burlap was 5.5 inches and not wired.
*2 sizes of wood plaques (if you want to go really artsy and add the team and number. If not, leave it out.)
*2 colors of acrylic paint
*Stencil for words on wood (not pictured)
*Sponge brush (not pictured)
*Football wood figure (not pictured)

D immediately saw my set up and assured me that the wire wreath is a race track

So, take the paper off of the brown burlap. Take one end and tie it into a knot onto the outside of the wreath anywhere. This is going to be your starting point. Grab an inch or two of the burlap and fold it over itself. Insert this “loop” into the next (middle) slot of the wire wreath. The knot is on the left and I fed a loop into the next slot from the back. Always bring the loops from the back to the front. Make another loop and feed it through the next slot. So, this next picture, I had made the knot and fed it through twice.

This picture shows me making the loop before feeding it through.

This picture shows me feeding it though the outside slot.

And pulling it through.

I fed the burlap through each section of the wreath about 3 times. You don’t need to do the whole thing because you still have 2 more rolls of burlap to feed through. So you should be able to still see the green wreath base. Once you get the hang of it, it gets easier. I love this project because it doesn’t have to be perfect. Those are my favorite projects.

This is what your wreath will look like after doing one color.

So with the next color (I used red), I just fed it through the blank spaces. Again, 2-3 times per section. The wire edged ribbon was easier to work with because you can widen it out to block out some of the green wire.

FYI, this was the easiest way to hold the wreath while I was feeding it through. Not the most attractive, but it worked. 😉

Again, with the blue, I fed it through all the empty spaces. It got a little tight toward the end but just keep working with it.

Here is the back:

And here is the front:

Next, I had to work on the wooden plaques. I painted them light brown and then cut out a stencil with my NEW CRICUT! out of vinyl. I tried freezer paper but it didn’t stick very well so the paint seeped underneath the stencil and looked like this:

My husband looked at it and said “what’s wrong with that? I think it looks fine.” Oh, bless your heart. But you must be blind.

After you cut out the stencil, weed the design (so take away everything you don’t need) so it looks like this:

Take a cut of transfer tape (or contact paper) and remove the non-sticky part. Rub the sticky part to the front of your vinyl stencil. Rub a lot!

Remove the back part of your vinyl stencil and place it onto your medium (in this case, the wood). SLOWLY remove the transfer tape. Take a small amount of paint on your sponge brush and blot onto the vinyl stencil. Remove the stencil and voila! You do not need to wait for the paint to dry.

When I did the bigger one, for whatever reason, some of the paint seeped through a little bit: