I’ve completed my first craft project of the year, a beautiful felt flower garland kit for my mantelpiece.
This is my third kit from The Handmade Florist, which was on my Christmas wish list. Previously, I’ve made a Cottage Garden bouquet and a Dahlias in Bloom bouquet.
This was basically the same as those but instead of wire stalks, you get a long piece of string to glue them onto for a garland. As usual, there were a lot of tiny pieces of felt to cut out but I quite enjoy this part, especially when the colours are so pretty.
Once I got the glue gun out, things went pretty fast as the instructions are clear and I’ve made similar things in previous kits. I was a bit intimidated by the big flowers but they weren’t too difficult in the end.
Attaching and gluing everything to the garland was fairly simple too, though it took a while to decide what order to place the flowers to get a nice balance. And then I hung it up on my mantelpiece and discovered something awful. The big flowers are really heavy and they were twisting the string round so that everything was facing straight down, giving you a lovely view of the boring back parts. I was so disappointed! I tried so many ways to fix it and nothing worked. So I left it there for 3 weeks while I sulked and decided where else to hang it. I guess it’s meant to be hung on a wall high up so that you’re looking up at it.
The obvious solution was to put it along the top of the mantelpiece where I could force everything to face forward. I had to use quite a lot of magic tape and little pegs to arrange everything but you can’t see that from the front.
I moved my Pusheen pom pom fairy lights up a bit to fill the gap where the garland was supposed to go and actually it all looks lovely. Despite the issues, I really enjoyed making this and will definitely be picking up another kit sometime.
Have a look at The Handmade Florist for more kits and downloads, including a free makealong.
