Make your own Advent wreath

Jessica and I (mostly Jessica) made our own Advent wreath. You can make one too, and for a whole lot less than you’ll find for those pre-made ones at the store.

What you’ll need

We did all our shopping at Walmart, but you’re likely to find equivalent Christmas supplies at Target or wherever you prefer to do your crafting shopping. In my experience, specialty and hobby stores like Michael’s are more likely to gouge you on price. But by all means, shop wherever you prefer.

The wreath.

It’s in the name. Of course you need one of these. We picked up a smaller one for $2.94.

Candles.

Depending on your preferences, you might make a wreath with just the four candles in a circle, or you might also put the fifth candle, the Christ Candle, in the center. We went with the latter.

Now, you could go a few different ways with the candles’ colors. Most of the candles are purple, but some churches also use a pink candle for the third week of Advent. And the Christ Candle — the center — is white.

If you go with regular old candles, you’ll have no problem finding purple, pink, and white candles. But we wanted battery-powered candles, because it’s a lot harder to start a fire with those. And to that end, we could only find battery operated candles in white; they were $0.92 each.

You could get the same size candle for the center, but if you want a larger one, the battery-powered ones are more expensive. We couldn’t find any by themselves, but we did find a 3-pack for $13. (For reference, a single large battery-operated candle from PartyLite cost upwards of $30.)

Acrylic paint.

If you want to paint those white candles, you’ll need some paint. Small bottles of every color imaginable are $0.98 each.

Paint brushes.

We initially tried the regular old paint brush, but we actually found that the sponge brushes work best on the candles’ surface. They’re only $0.50 each, but if you’re feeling particularly Scrooge-like, just get one and wash it between pink and purple.

Other decorations.

If you’re like us and you’re allergic to nature, you can find all kinds of artificial plant accessories for your wreath: pine cones, berries, leaves, you name it. We picked out some clip-on leaves. We also found a string of battery-operated lights that we liked — easily the most expensive thing in our supplies at $6.98.

The wreath base, wrapped in lights.

Putting it all together

Because we got all white candles, we had to paint ours to match the appropriate Advent colors. I’ll let Jessica explain here.

Once the candles were painted and dried with Jessica’s two-layer technique, they looked just like they’d come that way to begin with. We’re still not sure if the pink candle is supposed to go on the left or right — a Google search reveals both ways — so whatever, I guess.

Remember those clip-on leaves I mentioned earlier? We added those last, completing our Advent wreath.

2 responses

  1. It looks like Namine enjoys the anticipation of the season!

  2. Jolene Philo Avatar
    Jolene Philo

    Thanks for the videos to go along with the directions. They make a fun project easier and less stressful. Thanks for adding it to the DifferentDream.com Tuesday special needs link share.

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