Monday, February 7, 2011

A good idea gone wrong…..

It all started out innocently enough.

I know you’ve seen lots of great coffee filter wreaths.

Like these:

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fail

 

They have been on my mental ‘to do’ list for a long time.

It seemed simple enough.

Wreath base, coffee filters, glue or pins to attach the filters.

I attempted to cross it off the list.

I failed.

Well, maybe I should keep it crossed off the list if this is what I end up with.

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It seemed simple.  I thought a bit of color would be good so I dyed a stack of coffee filters with some alcohol and walnut inks.  I grabbed an orange wreath base I had picked up for free at a garage sale last summer.  I heated up my glue gun and went to work gluing on the coffee filters.  I realized the filters I dyed wouldn’t go nearly as far as I thought and it wasn’t giving me the look I was after.

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Hmm, stop and dye more filters or continue on and work with what I have?  I decided to trudge on.  It didn’t look that bad to start, I was sure I could make it work.  I thought I could ‘save’ the wreath by making it mostly white with some of the colored filters in random areas to maybe look like a colored hydrangea blossom.  Wrong choice.

I pulled out some of the smaller areas I had and ended up with two areas of color in a sea of white, no ‘sea’ isn’t right it is more of a ‘mound’.  Have you ever seen a pretty ‘mound’?  I don’t think so, (well maybe a mound of flowers can be pretty).  This ‘mound’ certainly doesn’t look pretty.  Not even remotely attractive.  Ok, well maybe not ‘that’ bad but still bad.

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I knew from reading other blogs that the wreaths end up a lot larger than they originally intended so I thought I was smart starting with a small wreath.  W.R.O.N.G.  Yep, all capital WRONG.  It was so small that there wasn’t really a hint of a wreath shape.  Oh there could have been a slight indent in the center but nothing wreath like.

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I 'thought’ I could still salvage it so I added some filters to the back of the wreath so I could glue some filters to the center to create the lovely ‘mound’ shape I saw in my head.  Seriously, why didn’t I scrap this yet?  Why?  Well, ‘It’s only $1 coffee filter, a free wreath and some glue’ so if I continue I’m not really out anything.

Except my dignity that is since I’m sharing my failure with you.

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So…….. the lessons I learned:

1 – things don’t always turn out like planned

2 – smaller is not always better, especially when it comes to a wreath

3 – sometimes it is better to just stop

4 – I can ‘fail’ and share it with others and still go on crafting

and

5 – even if it is only $1 sometimes just throw in the towel a bit earlier ;)

 

June

I’m not sure I’m confident enough to but if I can share……

I usually link to these fabulous parties:

1 comment:

  1. Honestly...with just a little more arranging, it might work...it was starting to look like a large peony at one point. :)

    ReplyDelete

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