It's Raining JellyBeans: Wedding: Rosette Wall Decor

Monday, July 15, 2013

Wedding: Rosette Wall Decor

I've blogged about the rosettes that I made for the wedding before; you can read those posts Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Today I want to show you the big "installation" that I made for outside of the barn doors. I am so in love with this project and sad to report that it rained on wedding day so I had to place it inside the barn- it looked good but didn't have nearly as big of an impact as it would have outside the barn doors.

Originally I intended to make the piece on tag board or chipboard but Hubby informed me it wouldn't be strong enough to hold up what I envisioned so I decided to use artists canvas. I grabbed two cheap 18x24" canvases from Michael's. To begin I made a bunch rosettes in a variety of colors, styles, and sizes. I used about 25 on each of the 2 panels, choosing my favorite ones for the top layer.

In my mind it seemed like an easy thing to glue a bunch of rosettes down, layer them until they looked pretty and call it a day. In reality it wasn't so easy. For one thing the rosettes have very little surface area to actually glue to each other except in the very centers- that is great except if I lined up the centers I would have a tower of rosettes, not a pretty wall of rosettes. The other issue was the depth of the individual rosettes. Because I used several different designs from the Cricut Ribbons andRosettes cartridge some folds were very deep and some weren't. That affected how they could be layered as I wanted them to lay evenly on the each other

To begin I measured out a 6x3' square on my floor and laid down a few pieces of Washi tape to keep the dimensions.

Then I laid the canvases inside those dimensions so that I could make two pieces that would together measure 6x3'. It wasn't important to be exact in my measurements but it gave me a goal as I started to lay things out. I had purposefully made some rather plain rosettes out of the cardstock that I didn't love but got a lot cheap. I always intended them to be the bottom of the pile. I laid them out (above) so that they were flat on the canvas and glued them down using LOTS of hot glue.

As I went along and realized the glue wasn't holding well (it is difficult to glue mountain fold to mountain fold because there isn't enough surface area). I started adding large circle punched pieces of cardstock along the back of the rosettes in the areas where I need to glue them. In hindsight I should ave added smaller ones on the top of the rosette below so that I was glueing circle-to-circle...but I didn't do that.

I built up the design as I went along, paying attention to the size and design of the rosette as well as the cardstock pattern and color of each one. In the end I didn't use any of the deep-folded ones because I couldn't get them to lay correctly with the other rosettes.

I made sure the top rosettes were the ones I loved the most.

You can see that the piece fits "together" in several different ways. Here I have it very close together but on the barn door (below during a trial fitting) I had them apart and one above the other. In the end they were one each side of the windows behind the stage-several feet apart. They look great any

which way.