Craft Night Motivation

This month's craft night was named "Motivate Me May" and I certainly needed the motivation to get my creative juices flowing. It has been a SUPER busy spring for me, and I'd been wanting to create a more colorful spring wreath for our front door for quite some time. Craft Night was just what I needed to force me to take the time to make it happen. I'd pinned this lovely wreath, found on Craftiness is Not Optional, a great blog by Jess:

So I picked up a wreath at Michaels for about $3 (with the coupon of course) and then, upon learning that Michaels doesn't have a great supply of felt, I headed to Hobby Lobby for the felt, which was only 25 cents for each 8x11 sheet. Of course they didn't have the exact colors pictured above, so I settled for something similar. My goal was just to try and replicate what Jess had created.

 From there I had to learn how to make the various flowers. I found some great tutorials online: Pom poms seemed the most forgiving to make -- see Miss Priss' instructions here. Though the rosette and scallopped flower were pretty quick and easy as well, as Jess lays out here and here And when I found this tutorial on dahlias, I was a little intimidated but thought they were beautiful so I gave it a try. (And actually, I didn't find that they were as hard as they looked.) After some work at Craft Night, and some work at home the following night, I ended up with this:

You can see that my dahlia turned out extra large and didn't look quite full enough. My husband also noted that all my flowers seemed a little big in proportion to the wreath, so I made a second attempt on a dahlia, picked a few flowers to save for another day, and ended up with this final result, which I am very happy with. Sometimes all it takes is a little motivation! :)