By now you are probably sick of hearing about this:

Too bad. There’s one more tiny installment.

And I mean TINY.

Last week Jay presented me with this:

A miniature advent wreath stand!!! This one fits in our house a LOT better!

I have to admit that the past two Sundays I have sat in the choir and wished that the wreath stand was mine. I mean, I guess it was kind of mine for a little bit, but I couldn’t ever bring it back home. Not that there’s room for it, but you know what I mean. So when Jay gave me this little one I was so happy.

I made a trip to Hobby Lobby during lunch this week to get wreath-making supplies. It was tough to find anything that I thought would work at this size. According to Jay he scaled the files down to 17% of the original size. I knew that I wouldn’t find anything to make it look ‘REAL’, but I didn’t want it to look stupid, either. I found some things and figured that I could make it work.

Or so I hoped. You see, I don’t really have an eye for this kind of thing. I’m only decent when it comes to needle and thread, but flower arranging and interior decorating are NOT my thing. So this was going to be tricky.

I had Jay make some better candle platforms for the arms and then I used the pipe cleaners (or ‘chenille stems’ as they were called on the package) to begin the filler part. By the way, are they not called pipe cleaners anymore because it’s not PC to talk about smoking? Or is there such a lack of pipe smoking outside of the Amish community that kids wouldn’t get the reference? I’ll have to ponder that a bit.

Jay was a bit dubious about the pipe cleaners until I told him that they were just for filler and not meant to really be seen. Then I started tearing apart the Christmas floral pieces I had purchased with smaller pieces of ‘garland’ in them.

At this point I was starting to despair. This looked horrible and I really am not good at this kind of thing. I knew that I didn’t have enough of the greenery left to really fill out the wreath like I wanted, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to spend any more money on this kind of stuff and I didn’t want the half-finished wreath sitting around until I could finish it up. I sat there in a grumpy sinus-headache induced sullenness trying to figure out what I could do. Maybe I could find some green tissue paper and make it look like a really bad wreath made out of tissue paper? No, that would suck worse than the pipe cleaners. Maybe I could go out and trim some greenery from some shrubs… but that meant going outside into the cold and snow. I racked my brain trying to think of anything that I might have in the Christmas stuff that I had put back into the crawl space that would work. I even contemplated pulling apart part of my Christmas tree. Then I remembered something! It just might work!

I ran upstairs, moved my shelf full of material and lace so that I could get into the crawl space. I pulled a bag out of there and I did a victory whoop!

Three years ago we received this deer centerpiece as a gift from Jay’s boss. Everybody who showed up at the Christmas party received one. Ours had been sitting in the crawl space in the bag because a) it’s not my taste and b) the cats would have chewed it all to pieces in about 15 minutes. I really didn’t feel like cleaning up glittery piles of puke. But this is why I was so excited:

It had greenery that looked real!!

Like a hunter I completely cleaned out that deer carcass…

I almost felt bad for the poor little guy. Almost.

Now I had plenty of wreath-making material! I gave haircuts to the branches with the really long needles until not only had I made a mess on my dining room table, but now the kitchen was littered with little plastic pine needles.

Using floral wire I wrapped branches around the ring and I attempted to hide the candle platforms a bit, too.

Not bad! This might work out okay after all…

Except, Jay didn’t like the little strays. I can understand. When his eyebrows start looking like this I usually take my embroidery scissors to them. Instead I cut more floral wire and did some more wrapping. Then I cut apart some of the pretties that I had purchased and inserted them here and there.

It actually looks like a wreath! It’s not nearly as pretty as the real one, but it will do for now.

Monday night our Small Faith Group will be here and so I will light this during our meeting. I think that it will look really nice!

And it is now Bob Approved.

Don’t worry. It’s currently sitting on the mantle so that the cats can’t nibble on it.

Now the only thing left to do is clean up. *sigh*