Christmas Nutty Pine Cone Door Wreath

 The past few days, I've had some fun with making a medium-sized wreath for my front door. I am very pleased with the result. What do you think? 

Materials:

9 inch styrofoam or wire wreath 25cm x 4 cm (9.75 inch x 1.6 inch)
24 inches of string (to hang)
scissors
tweezers

glue gun
white acrylic paint
red acrylic paint
No 4 flat paintbrush
water container

about 75 x 4cm (1.5 inch) round pine cones
11 x 4 cm (1.5 inch) redwood or sequoia cones
5 x horse chestnuts
7 x long acorns (painted red or green)
5 clusters of alder ones (painted white)
20 partially developed double acorns

2 handfuls of soft hemlock cones for filler
or use burlap to wrap the styrofoam or wired wreath

Here's How to Make It

Step 1
Collect and lay out your materials. It helps to know what you have before you start. 

Step 2
Fold the string in half and tie an overhand knot about 1 cm from the end. 

Loop string around the styrofoam wreath, tighten and glue in place. If you don't want the knot to show when you hang it, then slip the string around so the knot is near the styrofoam ring before you glue it.

Step 3
Plug in the glue gun to heat it.
Paint the alder cones and acorns and set aside to dry.

Here, I painted the acorns and had extra red paint left over so I used it to paint some acorn caps for another project. 

Step 4
Starting from the inside of the wreath, choose cones that are close in size. Lay them in place to see how well they fit the space. The bottoms of the cone face the styrofoam.

Glue each in place, snugging them next to each other. Place glue both where they touch the next cone as well as on the base of the cone.

Step 5
Working from the centre out, place the next row of cones alternating them in the spaces created by the first row and glue them in place.
Then lay out the next row of horse chestnuts alternating with pine cones. 

Step 6

Glue those in place for the next row. There will be spaces between them but that is okay. They will be filled in with the redwood cones as we go.

Step 7
Here the redwood cones have been laid out and three have been glued in place to fill in the spaces between the chestnuts and the pine cones.

Step 8
From here, keep filling in with the rest of pine cones in rows. Fit them together by choosing larger and smaller cones. Don't worry about larger gaps as we can fill those in later with the smaller items and hemlock cones.

Using slightly smaller cones on the top ridge of the wreath helps the larger ones to fit along the sides. 

Step 9
Once all the big cones are in place, use tweezers to remove the glue strings. (Or you can remove them after each layer is glued in place.)

Cones all glued in place. 

Here is the finished back side. No cones are on the backside so it sits flat against the wall, door etc. Note the cones on the outside row are flush with the bottom but there are gaps. Again, not to worry, these can be filled in with the small hemlock cones.

Step 10
Next, place the smaller pieces (painted red acorns, white alder cones and acorn caps) so they cover any gaps that show white and so they are pleasing to your eye. It is important to wedge the heavy acorns into spaces and glue well or they tend to fall off. For some types of acorns, you may need to scratch the surface so the glue sticks better. Alternatively, you can incorporate them deeper into the cones by building into the wreath them the same way you did the chestnuts and redwood cones.

Step 11
Fill in any obvious white spaces with the soft hemlock cones. Grasp the side of each hemlock cone, place the glue at the base and push them down into white spaces until the bottom of each cones makes contact with the styrofoam ring. Also add some hemlock cones are the sides of the ring where it meets the table.

Step 12
Hang your finished wreath!

This wreath is available as a kit! Check it out!