It is officially December and that means that we can all officially start our countdown to Christmas!! Well, some of us I started my countdown weeks ago due to pure excitement over all the Christmas decorations I could craft. My craft store shopping list was written and I had checked it twice and before the glue could dry on my last project I was off to the craft store to buy all the lovely and sparkly things I would need for the many Christmas crafts I have planned for this year.

The first project I wanted to tackle was an ornament wreath. I have seen them everywhere, like here, here and even fellow bloggers have made some really cute ones like here. So I read a few of the tutorials out there and set out to make my own Christmas Ornament Wreath. I purchased one large container of 45 shatterproof bulbs in a color assortment of red, white and silver. I dug out some red wired ribbon from my Christmas tote and then set off to find a wire hanger. I searched the house and as it turns out I didn’t have one. Not a single wire hanger in the entire house, not in the back of a closet or hiding in the laundry room, it is huggable hangers only for this girl. So when all else fails what do you do? Why, ask a friend for help of course, and Jen was kind enough to procure a wire hanger for me.

The first step was turning my hard to find wire hanger into a circle. So I pulled and pushed and bent it within an inch of its life until it looked like a nice round circle. Then I untwisted the attached part and was left with this strange-looking thing.

The next step was adding the bulbs. Many of the tutorials I read said that you should hot-glue the bulbs to their little silver tops (or attach-y things as I call them) but the shatterproof bulbs that I was using already seemed to be glued or permanently attached. So I skipped that step and went straight to stringing my bulbs on to my wire.

I alternated colors and sized until I was out of bulbs… I was out of bulbs… all 45 of them on the wire and my wreath was only 1/2 done. Not one to give up on a project I headed back to the attic to dig through my Christmas totes and found a lot of glitter plastic shatterproof bulbs that I had gotten on clearance the day after Christmas last year. But they were in fun colors like lime green, blue, purple and pink. This did not really match the red and silver wealth I had planned. But since I had a tote full of bulbs already I could not really justify going out and buying more just for this project. Convinced that I could make it work I headed back to my project new glitter bulbs in hand. The only way I could make them work was to take out the red ones. So I unstrung all of my bulbs and started over. At this point my project had already taken far longer than expected. So I have no pictures of the unstringing and restringing process. But it is pretty self-explanatory… as in I took all the bulbs off and put all the new ones on

With the original silver and white ones along with the new glittery ones I had found in the attic I had just enough, which I was pretty thankful for because I did not want to start over again. Then it was time to add the ribbon (I also located a new silver ribbon while digging in the attic, the red one I had dug out earlier was not going to work with my new color scheme). But when I started handling the wreath to tie on the bow, the bulbs started popping off. So I got out the hot-glue gun and hot-glued the bulbs on to their tops and as I was adjusting them a few more would pop off…. at one point I am pretty sure 10 bulbs popped off the dang wreath. So word to the wise, even though the bulbs feel sturdy and perma-attached to their tops they are not!! If you are going to attempt this project… which seemed really easy when I started but then turned into a long Christmas bulb battle… don’t skip the hot-gluing step! Just save yourself the time and trouble and pull off the tops and hot-glue them back on before you start stringing your wreath together.

There were a few bumps in the road, and I did end up hot-gluing all of the bulbs, but I ended up with this really cute Christmas Ornament Wreath.

In the end it was worth all the time and trips to the attic I had to make to get it completed. Have any of you had a simple project turn out to be more difficult or time-consuming than you planned for? Maybe it was a project like this one? Please tell me I am not the only one that struggled with this wreath idea/project?

Update: I shared this post!! There are some pretty awesome bloggers out there that host link-up parties and I took full advantage by sharing my post; here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you found us though one of these link parties, well welcome to our blog, and leave us a comment telling us who sent you so we know who to thank!  Also, go check out some (or all) of these blogs they are all pretty great!