Happy Valentine's Day!

Well, since I've been crazy about looking at craft blogs lately, I had to share one that truly inspired me... LIMA BEAN WREATH Yeah, I know... I totally hate lima beans, too -- in fact, I don't know anyone who likes them. BUT they made the cutest wreath ever, don't you agree? And let me also reference this one, which seems to have started it all: Acorn Wreath So, I decided to make my own... but our Wal-Mart didn't have ANY forms. "No problem, I said, "I'll just go to Jo-Ann's." But it was not to be -- I completely forgot to look while I was there, and I get to Jo-Ann's about once every three months. SOOOO to make a long story short, I had this great idea to make my own form. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I took two hangers, cut off the handle of one (for the interior heart -- and thanks to Joel, it didn't take me ALL NIGHT LONG), and bent the heck out of them both until they looked like hearts, one smaller and one bigger. I had to unbend the handle of the bigger heart, which was a pain, but it gave me just enough extra to work with to make it bigger. I liked the shape of the interior one the best, and one side of the top of the heart had a little more "character" than the other side, but all-in-all I thought it looked pretty great, so I used ton of packing tape (WHERE on earth is my duct tape, I'd like to know?!) to secure them together. I was going to use some spare fleece to wrap around the form I'd made, but Joel recently consolidated all my fabric stash into about 4 big boxes, and I just couldn't find it. Providence smiled, though, because during my search I spied a HIDEOUS pink-and-blue knit maternity dress I'd worn in a former life. FYI, if you're making your own form, knit is TOTALLY the way to go! It stretches to form a tight wrap, and it doesn't fray and leave a ton of dangly threads all over -- love it! But I'm getting ahead of myself -- First, I cut off about 2" of the hem of my maternity dress... and kept on going. I ended up cutting more and more until I cut about up to the "natural" waist (as though maternity dresses HAVE waists!). Then I started bunching up fabric on the form to give it a little depth, and then wrapped a layer of the 2" around and around to secure it. At the end of each hem, I just tucked the end under a previous wrap to make it stay. All the way around, I tried to keep the height pretty uniform, so lima beans would look good. And when it was done, I really, really considered spray painting the form red, then the beans pink, because that would be DARLING, but decided to go the way of quickness. I just started hot-gluing those lima beans all over the place! It was surprisingly fun to do, except when I put too much hot glue down and burned my finger -- be careful and use glue sparingly! AND when I was about 1/3 of the way finished, I decided I wasn't staggering my lima beans enough and ripped off all but the first two rows (sadness!). Did you know that knit adheres to itself when it's hot-glued? But I loved the organic-ness of using my own form, as opposed to styrofoam, because then if one lima bean was too high, I could just add a little dab of hot glue, push the little guy down, and he would stay. After that, of course, came the spray paint. I tried about four coats of red (the only downside to knit -- it totally absorbs the paint!), and -- surprise! -- it was great! So I left it, hung it with a white piece of muslin, and called it good. What do you think of that wonky side?