Breast Cancer Awareness Wreath

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Charities and medical associations everywhere strive to increase awareness of the disease as well as raise money for research, diagnosis, prevention, treatment and a cure. This is the perfect month to remind every woman you love to schedule a mammogram and know how to self-check for early detection.

Show you care with a fun and easy craft that you can display for all passers-by to see: a beautiful pink wreath!

To make a wreath similar to ours, you'll need the following materials:

• Wreath form (we suggest using a straw wreath form – leave on the plastic wrap)
• Fabric, yarn, ribbon, or netting for wrapping
  
• Felt and/or fabric for flowers
• A variety of buttons
• Glue (we recommend Fabri-Tac glue, available at most craft stores, or hot glue)
• Scissors

1. Cover your wreath form by wrapping with fabric, yarn, ribbon or netting. We used ivory-colored yarn and layered it with pink netting, which we found at a local thrift store. You could use any combination of fabric, ribbon, or other wrap-able materials - just think pink!

2. Create a variety of small flowers using felt and/or fabric. For felt flowers like ours, refer to the easy how-to in our holiday issue of Stitch, Craft, Create on page 73.

To make fabric flowers:

• Cut a piece of fabric about 1" wide and about 12" to 18" long.
  
• Fold fabric in half lengthwise and glue together along raw edges.
  
• Apply a 1-2" line of glue at one end of fabric strip and begin rolling up fabric from this end, twisting the strip of fabric every so often (once every wrap or two) to give it dimension.
  
• To finish flower, adhere the end of the fabric strip to the rolled flower with a dot of glue.

3. Use hot glue or Fabri-Tac to adhere flowers onto wreath as desired; we grouped ours together so they would sit on the bottom right of the wreath.

4. Glue a scattering of coordinating buttons onto wreath as desired. Add a pink ribbon for hanging and voila - you're all done!