Make a Lovely Rag Wreath for Spring Door Decor

With my success of the mesh wreath I made for Valentine's Day, I decided to try a different type of door wreath using rag strips. With its bright colors in different ranges of blue, I could hang it on the front door for spring and summer seasons. 

Early in January during clearance sales at Michael's, I came across these bags of fabric strips.

I wasn't sure what I could do with them, but they were marked down to 97 cents, so I bought all the bags with blue designs, ten in all!

I already had this heart-shaped wireframe from Dollar Tree that didn't work for the mesh wreath but thought I would give it a go for this project.

The fabric was cut into 36-inch strips with pinking shears. I first went through all ten bags and separated the fabric into like patterns to see how much I had of each design. 

Next, I cut the strips into 7-inch lengths, also with pinking shears. For the colors in the wreath to be proportional, I arranged the fabric in rows, making an alternating light/dark pattern, with the same number of strips in each row.

(I could have gotten more strips if I cut them into 6-inch pieces, but I tried out different sizes first to see what seemed to work best. Since I was tying on each piece of fabric with a knot, 7-inches seemed to work best.)

When I was happy with the pattern (approximately 12 rows of fabric, alternating light and dark colors, about 25-30 pieces per row) it was time to tie the strips on the wireframe.  

But to do that, I needed to find a program to binge on Netflix while I worked, and decided on The Great British Baking Show!

On this frame, the middle wire stands up higher than the top and bottom wires. I began with the inside lower wire, then the outside wire, and finally the middle one, since that was the easiest to reach as the wreath got thicker.

As I went along, I realized that it was good that I had so much fabric. The cotton fabric was lightweight, and to have the thickness I wanted, I tied more pieces than I planned onto each section of the frame. 

After I completed the entire wreath, I had some strips leftover, and I went back and added them into different spots to make it thicker.  

For finishing touches, I used a 2-inch white grosgrain ribbon from my stash to make a loop for the back. 

I added a white ring wrapped with ribbon and a bow and I was finished!