As the days are getting longer, I can feel the spring fast approaching. We’ve been blessed with some sunny days lately here in London – just about time! After all, spring is officially starting later this week. I recently came across a DIY craft kit I had bought ages ago – one for making a floral wreath with felt flowers – and I decided to give it a go. If you’d like to create a similar wreath but don’t have access to the same assorted kit, don’t worry! You can easily get the right supplies individually, and I included some tips for that.

Contents of a DIY kit for making a floral wreath with felt flowers

The box included all the necessary supplies:

• a wooden hoop, 20 cm in diameter
• a needle
• green thread
• green ribbon – 3 metres long, 1 cm wide
• a few short pieces of red ribbon
• felt sheets in white, light green, dark green, yellow, orange and red – with pre-cut petal shapes
• 6 fake daisies, made of fabric and plastic

It also included a leaflet with step by step instructions.

Additionally, I used scissors and a hot glue gun.

Getting the supplies if you don’t have the same assorted DIY kit

You should be able to get all supplies in a craft store. A needle, ribbons and thread should be easy to find – you may even have some at home.

You may be able to find a plain wooden hoop in a craft store. If you can’t see any, there’s an alternative. Look for wooden or bamboo embroidery hoops in the sewing section. They come in two parts, with the inner one being a plain circle. You can buy an embroidery hoop, take it apart and use the inner part as the base for the wreath.

I’m not convinced the daisies included in the kit were a great choice. You can probably find much prettier ready-made fabric flowers in a haberdashery.

You should also be able to find felt sheets in craft stores. The ones in my kit were thin – around 1mm. They were 19 cm x 35 cm each.

You’ll need to prepare your own stencil for the petals. The petals in my kit were 6 cm long and just under 3 cm wide in the widest section. They had a teardrop shape – wider on one end, slimmer and pointy on the other. There were 34 petals in each of the 6 colours, but I only ended up using around half of them. I recommend cutting a stencil out of paper, and then tracing it on the felt sheets. Then, use a sharp craft knife to cut out your petals. I imagine this will be quite time consuming!

One thing that’s worth mentioning is that assorted DIY kits are usually a lot cheaper than buying all the supplies individually. I bought the whole set for just £3, discounted from £6. I’m pretty sure it would cost me closer to £20 if I wanted to buy everything separately.

Preparing the base of the wreath

According to the instructions, the first step was preparing the base of the wreath by wrapping the wooden hoop with green ribbon. I originally wrapped the ribbon at a too small angle and ran out of ribbon. I had to unfold it and start over.

Top tip: I used some bag clips that I use in the kitchen to hold the ribbon in place.

The instructions said to use the needle and thread to stitch the end of the ribbon to the beginning to hold it in place. Well, good luck with that! I’d like to see how they attempted to sew into a ribbon tightly wrapped around a hard wooden base. Feel free to try that, but I just used some hot glue to hold everything together.

Attaching a loop for hanging the wreath

Then, I tied one of the short pieces of red ribbon into a loop, and then tied it onto the base of the wreath. I attached everything with hot glue again. The instructions kept this step for the very end of the project, but I figured that it would be easier to do it up front.

Preparing the petals

If you’re making your own petals, cut them out of the felt sheets as advised before.

The assorted kit that I used had those petals pre-cut, but I still needed to use scissors to get them out – each petal was attached to the sheet in a few places. I probably could have just pulled them out, but I didn’t want any loose, uneven fluff on the edges.

Sewing the petals into clusters

Next, following the instructions, I sewed the petals together in clusters of threes and twos. I folded the petals in half along the longer edge, and stitched them together on one end, closer to the wider end. I kept the clusters multicoloured for more variety in the finished wreath.

This step took a very long time to complete. The felt was quite difficult to push the needle through, especially when it was folded in half. It took me a few hours to get the first batch of flowers done, using around half of the petals from the kit.

Attaching the petals to the wreath

Next, I pulled the thread through the base of a felt flower cluster, then wrapped it around the hoop and tightly tied the ends. I repeated it for each cluster, placing the groups of three petals around the wreath first, then adding the clusters of two in between. The project was finally coming together!

I continued adding the petal clusters until I ran out of them. I still had a lot of individual petals left, but the wreath was looking lush already! I decided to call it there.

Final touches – adding the daisies

Finally, I added the six daisies that came with the kit. I’m not sure how I feel about them, I feel like it’s possible to find much nicer flowers in haberdasheries, but I went with what I had – I can always replace them with nicer flowers in the future.

Finished floral wreath with felt flowers

And finally, after hours of work, the project was completed. I’m really happy how it turned out! Despite it being an assorted DIY kit, it still required a lot of effort, but it was worth it. It felt like the perfect craft project for the start of spring. My fingers might be aching from sewing the felt petals together, but I really enjoyed the process and now have a pretty DIY floral wreath to decorate my home with.

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• DIY