When good ideas go bad.

A few weeks ago, I read about a blogger who used inexpensive pipe insulation as a wreath form. I had also seen the idea on Pinterest, so I figured I'd try it out. It seemed pretty fail safe, right? You take the insulation, make a circle, tape the ends together and you have your form!

Ha! Yeah right. This was not as easy as everyone had made it out to be! In fact, this project went south pretty quickly! But did I stop when I started seeing the signs?? Of course not. But I'll get there....for now back to the project.

I swung by Home Depot and after roaming the aisles a bit, I found a long piece of the stuff for just $1.28...score!

My goal with this project was to make a yarn wrapped wreath with felt rosettes in purples, grey, and black. So I gathered my materials and started wrapping the form with a thick yarn. One of the perks of using the insulation was not having to keep moving the bundle of yarn through and around the wreath with each wrap. That much was true. It was really easy and quick to wrap the straight piece of foam.

But that's where the ease ended. Because as soon as I started to shape the foam into a circle, it started doing this...

It buckled! I should have known this wasn't going to work, but I kept going anyway.

And don't get me started on how difficult it was to tape the ends together! I tried keeping both ends flat but it would just buckle more! So I tried cutting each end at an angle and fitting them together, but that wasn't working either. I finally just settled and taped the stupid thing together as best I could. Ha!

It wasn't pretty but I figured I would just cover this lopsided mess with rosettes and it will be fine.  

And it was. For the most part. Once the rosettes were on, I thought it looked pretty good! I loved the colors and it helped even out the shape of it.

But because the wreath was heavier on the left side and the form was so misshaped and buckled, I had to hang it off center for it to hang straight! The above picture is using the hook on the back of my bathroom door since I needed to figure out if it would hang straight. Of course, the hook on my bathroom door is centered, which means the wreath is not. Ugh. And anytime I tried to move it so it would be centered, the thing thing would swing down due to the weight of the rosettes and the buckled part of the wreath would show even more! You can see the beginnings of the buckling there in the right hand corner.

It was a mess.

Again, I should have just stopped there, but of course, I didn't. I hung it on my front door anyway. I had to MacGyver it with a little tape and managed to get it somewhat decent. I don't have any pictures of it hanging on my front door, but it looked similar to the picture above. At least in the beginning.

It hung for a few days but started drooping more and more and was slowly becoming a jagged oval! It looked awful (at least to me) so the wreath came down last night and in a fit of frustration very calm manner, I decided to just chuck it and start over but salvaged my rosettes, which were hot glued to the yarn.

I was able to save most of them, but I can't say the wreath form or yarn were as lucky.

You can see what became of the form after hanging a few days...it was a total disaster!

So what's the moral of this story, sometimes the cheaper option will cost you more in the end! I wasted yarn, hot glue, a little bit of felt and A LOT of my time in order to save a few bucks on the wreath form. Never again!

Of course, I accept that this disaster may be operator error since it seems that other folks have been able to successfully use pipe insulation as a wreath form. Or perhaps, they're just not telling you the whole story. Either way, it was a learning experience.

So with that wreath in the trash, I need to make another one. Off to Michael's...