How to Make a Southwestern Christmas Wreath With Pretzels

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Ginny with Simply Beautiful Crafts on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to make a southwest Christmas wreath. Whenever you are using additional food beyond your pretzels, you want to make sure that that food is shellacked or dipped in some kind of varnish or polyurethane. You can either put your ribbon through first and then dip your part of your food into your shellack or use a paint brush or you can put the food on first and then weave the ribbon starting from behind the food. What I did to make this wreath was to start with my ribbon, whenever you put the ribbon through a wreath you want to start behind a joint, come up through, go over and weave the ribbon in and out through your wreath. If you need to measure your ribbon ahead of time you can wrap your ribbon once and a half around your wreath and you will have plenty of ribbon with extra, if you want to go once and a quarter around you will probably have enough. I just leave it in the spool usually and go with it. If you are using a ribbon that has a different side, one side different from the other you need to make sure that it is not twisted in the back as you go. Once you have gotten all the way around your wreath weaving your ribbon through, you want to secure your ribbon in the back. You can use your hot glue gun to do this even though you cannot use it to put your pretzel wreath together because once it has been varnished or shellacked, sealed however you have chosen to seal it, your hot glue gun will be effective. So you get to the end of your project, wrapping your ribbon around I, lay a bead of hot glue at the end of your ribbon in it and hold it till it is cool then you are going to put the other end right there and hold it until it is cool. Then what I did was to take chilies, I got them in the spice section of the grocery store. You can get silk ones from your local store but I wanted a more authentic look, so I got the real thing. Just a warning with these real chilies they are very hot. Put the chilies on and secure them and then make sure that you varnish them in one way or another whether or not it is dipping it in. Then I used stickers and I used bell and I used twine and made myself a little lasso here and the last thing that you want to do, you can use your ribbon or you can use twine or rope and make a hanger for your wreath, so that you can hang it on the tree or on the wall. Then when you are all finished, it is ready to hang because you have used hot glue. So that is how to make a southwestern Christmas wreath for your Southwestern Christmas tree."