One of the little handmade things I’m making this year for some of my friends who celebrate Christmas is jingle bell wreaths. I’ve seen these in magazines, and they are super-easy to make.
My first thought was to take apart a wire wreath form and use tin snips to open the circle and push the jingle bells on, but what works a million times better is to just use a wire with a gauge that is loose enough so that it is easily bendable but strong enough so that it holds its shape.
I had a bunch of long copper wire pieces from my orchid growers (they put these in the pots to hold the message card) so we just unbent these:
…and bent it (very easy) into a circle shape:
My wire-nose pliers were used to make a little C loop-back on one end so that the bells wouldn’t slide off, and that’s also what I bent the other end of the wire in to, to close the circle once the bells were on:
I just used regular jingle bells -these are big ones but I bought some smaller ones for other wreaths. They have all different sizes at the craft shop:
I just strung all the bells onto the form, and turned every other one a different direction once they were on the form so that it looked nice. I used tin snips to take off the extra length of wire, then used my little pliers to loop around that C shape on the other end to close it off. This is a small wreath, so I used some nice wide ribbon to hang the wreath:
I put the ribbon right over the closure so it can’t be seen at all.
…I think it turned out pretty nice:
I can’t wait to give these away as little presents!