My Iron Craft project for the Red, White and Blue Challenge could also be called “turning lemons into lemonade,” since it was not the project I planned at all. Originally, my plan was to crochet a rope rug for out front step. After shopping around a bit I ended up buying 10 yards of red cotton cording from the trim section of the fabric store and 40 yards of white from the upholstery section. (The white is actually used to fill in piping on pillows and furniture. It is twisted instead of braided like the red cord, much softer and cost $0.89 a yard compared to $1.79. Luckily, I also had a 40% off coupon since I was buying so much.)

Crochet went out the window right away as the rope just didn’t have the give I needed to get nice stitches. So, I switched to knitting. Getting a nice even tension was still tricky, but it worked much better. The problem was after using all the rope I had my rug was only 10″ long. I needed at least another 200 yards to get the 18″ x 30″ rug I was shooting for. That was more than I wanted to spend. Time to hit the drawing boards.

I wanted to use the rope, so I focused my ideas on that. I batted around doing a rope bowl, but then started thinking I really wanted something for the front of the house for the Forth of July. A rope wrapped wreath seemed just the thing.

This wreath is super easy to make. It can be a little time consuming to wrap all the rope the way you want (especially if you glue every wrap down like I did at first), but you can easily finish one this afternoon and have it hanging before the festivities tomorrow. I like the way it has a bit of a nautical feel to it as well.

Stars and Stripes Rope Wreath

Supplies:

• 12″ extruded styrofoam wreath
• 3/16″ rope or cording in red and white (about 5 yards of red and 25 yards of white)
• hot glue gun and glue
• Three 1 1/2″ – 2″ blue stars (I found wooden stars for $0.19 each and painted them a gloss blue. You could also use plastic or cardboard stars)

1. Cut red rope into pieces big enough to wrap around the wreath twice. Glue in place at various spaces around the wreath with the ends at the back. I chose to randomly space them out, but you could also be very precise.

2. Glue the end of the white rope to the back of the wreath next to a read stripe and start wrapping to fill in the entire wreath. Glue the rope down every few rows. (At first I was gluing every row, but that wasn’t really needed and took forever.)

Since a wreath is bigger on the outside than the middle you will need to overlap the rope at the inside from time to time to fill it in completely.

3. Glue the stars in place.

4. Tie a small piece of rope into a loop. Glue to the back of the wreath where you want the top to be for a hanger.

We hope all our readers in the States have a wonderful Fourth of July.