DIY: Make a Wreath Base/Form for $1!

We've had a blast this Fall doing all sorts of crafts like this one. Besides finger painting with the kids, I also was able to make my first wreath! The best part is that I made it all for $5! I'll show the results in another post. Before I get some pictures of the wreath I made, I wanted to share how to make a wreath form for only $1. I learned how to do it when I happened upon this post, and I couldn't be more excited! All you need is a pool noodle from the dollar store and a dowel, or you can be more creative and improvise by trying to use a marker, or hoola hoop...maybe just some duct tape...

Before we move on, I apologize for the crappy quality of pictures. These were taken on my iPod because I couldn't use my camera since the battery was missing.

First, I decided how big I wanted my wreath to be and then I cut off part of the pool noodle I didn't need (By the way, If your pool noodle isn't completely round, save the piece you cut off for another fun craft you can do with your kids. I'll write another post on it soon) :

Then, I'm pretty sure you could just duct tape the edges together and call it good, or you could try to make it a little more secure. I wanted to make mine extra secure so I used a broken piece of hoola hoop. Snap off a good sized piece like this:

Then, put the hoola hoop piece (or marker) in both ends to see how long it should be. Adjust the size accordingly. Then, wrap and glue (with a glue gun) a piece of felt around it to make it a bit wider. After your felt is on, put more hot glue on the felt and glue it to the inside of the noodle. As a heads up, the glue will melt the pool noodle a bit if you squeeze the glue directly on it. Here's what the felt looked like:

After I'd glued the felt covered hoola hoop piece to both ends of the noodle it looked like this:

Normally, you could just secure edges with duct tape, but I skipped this part because I was already planning to wrap fabric around the whole form. So, I just bound the edges with fabric. Here's what it looks like so far.

And that my friends, is how you can make your own wreath base for a dollar!