 Hi everybody it's Sam at Mixed Up Craft, thank you for watching my tutorial day. This is my last Easter project and I thought I'd do something nice for the house so this is going to be my Easter wreath. So I like to do something like this every year. I think I was I done a rosette one last year. So some of you will know that I've recently received or got a Cricut machine. So I was playing around and a bit crazy and as you can see cut lots and lots of flowers. So I've got all these beautiful little petals here which I'm just kind of shaping. So I've just got a mat here which I made actually from the packaging that I received my Tim Holtz Stampin platform in. So it's just kind of a few layers of soft foam or plastic and then it's got that black foam on top and you can see there I'm just using my the larger ball end of this stylus that I've got from paperbox.com and yeah just shaping them. So I also cut some leaves you can see they've got the big big ones to the far right and then those smaller kind of leaves as well. So then I went ahead and this is using the chipboard that I got from Every Crafts a Pound. This is 4mm and then this is some ribbon which I shared in one of the What Did I Get videos and this was just some ribbon that I received in this kind of bargain pack. It was just that kind of thing that I'm not really going to use dare I say on show it's just not my kind of style but it was perfect for wrapping around this chipboard. Now of course you could just maybe paint this you know add some gesso on it or something like that or wrap some paper around it but I just wanted something quick and easy so I'm just wrapping around this ribbon. So it's got that kind of shiny trim to the sides of it but it was just the right amount to cover this whole piece. Now the ring itself is just under 12 by 12 okay so again if you do want to make something of a similar size you want something that's about 12 by 12 and it's a two inch ring okay so in the circling side you just want to obviously cut down a bit smaller but don't worry if it's rough you could see how you know mine was really kind of wrecked really but once you wrap that ribbon around it's you would never know so you don't need to worry too much. So now my ring is all prepared and I'm just using my cropper dial here just to punch two holes through so that I can hang my ribbon so I've already got somewhere to hang this up because I have in the past made wreaths got finished you know got to the end finished it all and then I've thought oh how am I going to hang it up so I've remembered this time to add my little kind of string or ribbon here first and then I can work around that so it's um yeah just standard knot at the back but you're not going to see any of that but um now I've got something nice to hang it on when it's all finished so we are now ready to go and basically all I'm doing is got my hot glue gun on and I'm just going to absolutely cover this ring with all of these lovely flowers which took no time at all now of course if you don't have the cricket you can die cut these you can use pre-made cut flowers it's still very easy to do with you know with whatever it is that you have so you can see there what I'm doing now the ones with the holes in the middle they're all going to be covered and you'll see that um in a moment as well but this was really really quick to do it didn't take because the beauty of the cricket is you just program it in and it cuts it for you and you can carry on do other things so this yeah this project was so much faster than it would have taken if I did have to die cut them all but I still enjoyed doing that anyway so yeah if you want speed then get yourself a cutting machine because I love mine now so you can see there how great this is looking and how full it is now the greeny kind of coloured flower looks a lot more I guess fluorescent and so do those leaves but they're not that fluorescent in real life so I guess the lighting on my camera is is just picking it up or the lighting from my lamp sorry and my camera is just picking up slightly different now I'm adding in those big leaves so I try to I guess balance these out because they are quite big so I have kind of an equal amount going around in the centre and then the same around the outer side as well now they did stand out quite a lot initially and I thought I want to try and blend them in but again through the course of this you will see once I add a lot more to it they do start to you know I think balance out and they look really great so now I'm adding in those smaller little leaves and again just that nicer kind of green breaks up all the other colours and just adds a bit more well just colour brightness there's just yeah that's that's me that's what I like and they're really it's just happy and bright and it's just nice to be using yeah all these fresh colours now that we've got these nicer evenings and everything all days so now I went and cut the happy Easter now this was a very thick mirrored cardstock and initially I did cut it first but I didn't get my pressure right so I had to cut it again so what I'm going to do is I want to create some bunting so I'm cutting well with this white piece now I'm just going to roughly work out and these are one and a quarter by two all of these little pieces now that I'm going to cut so these are one and a quarter inch strips and then they will be two inches this way I believe once I've done one yeah two okay so just go through and cut myself enough for every letter for the happy Easter and then what I'm going to be doing is adding little flag tails onto the bottoms of them now again you could have a die for this that's you know fine I could have probably cut this on the cricket but this was just really easy to do anyway so you can see them just cutting up right in the center by about half an inch and then join up from either side so up through the middle and then I was deciding what to do do I do that one do I do that one and then I just went along and used that one as kind of a bit of a guide really for all of them so they were all exactly the same so just go through right up through the middle and then cut up each side and there you have a lovely little bit of bunting so it's really easy to do it doesn't take no time at all you can also do what's the other way of doing the bunting I've lost my train of thought now anyway there's a few different variations that you can do but I was really pleased with that I thought it looked nice so now I'm just going along just sticking them all down so just got some of my Alina's tacky glue there and again that took no time and there was you know it was they want too small that the glue was kind of oozing out everywhere so they they did stick down nicely and I definitely like that font and that size so I'll be using that one a lot more as well so that's all my bunting ready now I've got some bakers twines this is just a nice nice pinky color and I'm just running some glue along the top of the back side there of each of those letters and just sticking it onto the ribbon I've got about a quarter of an inch gap in between each one and you could hole punch I guess and weave it through I did think about doing that but again this is just for speed and it just looks as good anyway so I wasn't too too worried it's not going to be out for weeks and weeks and weeks like Christmas so I was quite happy with how that looked so now I'm going to start adding this onto the wreath itself I've got my lovely big yellow ribbon here for my bow now a few of you have asked how I make my bows I was horrendous really really bad I used to say in loads of my earlier tutorials I'm really bad but I guess now I'm slowly getting better but I will do a little tutorial just showing you how I do them but I guess it's just down to just keep practicing but yeah I don't find them hard anymore so I was all fingers and thumbs before but it does make a difference with the kind of ribbon you use I find as well if you've got a good quality especially even thicker I find that I can make you know really really nice bows with it so I was just trying to work out which angle I needed then to make my kind of flag flag tails there so now I'm sticking that down so I just got my little silicon finger protector there because some of you have asked in the past what that is it's just perfect when you're using hot glue because you can apply pressure and you don't obviously burn yourself so I will share any links there by stick to brand I believe it was so that's the first ones they're stuck down I'm just kind of holding it up just to make sure everything hangs nicely I did have to kind of flatten some of the leaves underneath just so that obviously that happy did did lie nicely flat or nice and flat should I say and then I'm just again bringing in the Easter and just sticking that just below but so now I'm just sticking that big bow right in the middle and I do end up cutting down the tails a little bit because they were just kind of hanging a bit too far down for my liking so I was just trimmed them up a little bit shorter so now I've got these they're just polystyrene glitter eggs they sell them in the pound shop they sell them pretty much every year so I've got the small ones and I've got some slightly larger ones as well the larger ones are just going to be decorated on the Easter table kind of scattered around really but these ones I'm actually now going to stick in the center of every single flower on that wreath so rather than having like a little well center of a flower you know just like a little circle die cut you know something like that some like flatback pearls or some gemstones and things I thought I'm going to add the Easter eggs and it just really brought it together it added some sparkle it added more texture and dimension and obviously made it feel even more Eastery so it was perfect and I didn't even think about it before I cut all those flowers so the colors that I cut the flowers I personally don't think could have matched any better because it just works really really well I think I used every single color egg I've got the blue there I guess the blue is the color that maybe doesn't go as much but the purple the yellow the green the orange the pink the yellow they all go go perfectly and there you have it a really cute Easter wreath so much color a little bit of shine from the silver letters you know that lovely big bow and I think personally that that's better than a lot of the ones that you see in the shops so now you can see it against the white background and it really does pop I think those green leaves all the way around really kind of frame it um yeah the style of the flowers the colors everything all came together really well so this I guess is my first official cricket project but can be made just using normal die cuts like I said pre die cuts and so on so I hope you've enjoyed it I hope it's inspired you you could make these very small you could make it as a table centerpiece you know so there's lots of ways to change this as well if you wanted to and of course it can be made for many other occasions as well so that's the last of my Easter projects as I said and I will be back again on Friday with another tutorial thanks for watching bye