I am so glad that warm days are here again! Being a Florida girl, I tend to get the winter blues pretty badly. Don’t get me wrong – I love the cold weather and snuggling up under a pile of blankets, but the lack of color and vibrancy gets to me. A few weeks ago, I had reached my breaking point with all the gray, dreary days. I had to do something, but couldn’t figure it out.

And then it hit me out of the blue. I needed a pinwheel wreath. Something that would counteract all the icy weather. Something that screamed spring, cool breezes, sunshine and fun. The more I thought of it, I also pictured soft grass and lots of color in the form of a yarn wreath.

Two things stopped me: 1) I am absolutely not a paper crafter, and 2) I vowed I’d never ever make a yarn wreath after getting overly annoyed with the process on my first try after only getting about an eighth of the way around. So a yarn wreath with paper pinwheels seemed like the most intimidating craft project ever.

Still, the idea kept nagging at me, and I knew I had to do it.

I found gorgeous fuzzy yarn in different shades of springy green and white. Wrapping the wreath wasn’t so annoying this time around.  A little time-consuming, but not bad. I guess these days, after spending my daylight hours running after two kids, I welcome anything that is calm and monotonous in my down time.

I then made pinwheels from double-sided scrapbooking paper in two sizes using 6×6 and 3×3 squares and used my sewing pins for the center.

I sprayed the pinwheels with super high shine modge podge spray to protect them from the elements a little bit. I did two layers on the back, and then about five on the front. You don’t need to do that many layers on the front, but I loved how shiny it looked and kept doing more. It almost looks like plastic. So cool. Once they were dry, I pinned them into place on the wreath.

It needed something more, so I thought a fun ‘hello!’ would be cute. I used shrink plastic (also known as Shrinky Dinks) and my Slice cutter to cut out four-inch letters, colored them in with a purple marker, baked them and hot glued them onto the wreath.

Cute, but… I wasn’t loving the purple letters. After a week or so, it really bugged me and I took it down until I could figure out what to do. It looked too plain without the letters, but I hated the purple. I tried painting them yellow, but it didn’t work. Finally, I modge-podged some extra paper from the pinwheels and they became orange with white dots.

I just love how it turned out. So simple, so fun, and different from what you normally see. Most  of all, I love that it screams “SPRING!!!!”