Chinese New Year Wreath

Chinese New Year is almost upon us.  New Year's Eve will be on Sunday the 22nd so I thought it was time to start work on the 84 cent wreath.  The Lunar New Year heralds the coming of spring and in Asia is the most important holiday - similar to our Christmas.

There are a lot of traditions associated with the new year such as the colour red, firecrackers, money and fish.  Also, the new year would be the Year of the Dragon, so my plan was to incorporate all these things into the wreath.   Unfortunately, the stores are full of Valentine's Day items now - nothing to be had on the Lunar New Year front.

So, I decided to build on the "spring" theme, but include a few items which would make it Chinese.  I found some stemmed flowers at IKEA which were previously used in a display.

Can't Beat 10 Cents!

They also quite by chance also had Dragon finger puppets.  So I got a few.

Grrrrr !

Then it was just a matter of sticking the flowers onto the wreath.  The first few flowers I cut, not realizing that you could bend them into shape.  Newbie mistake. 

Working Away

I put all the flowers on first. Here is the wreath 1/2 done:

It took about 2 hours to do, I was also skyping with my mom at the same time.  She thought I should include something red. After the flowers, I added the dragons, but it still did not seem very New Years-y. 

Big J suggested that I put a big Chinese word in the middle.  I didn't have one so instead I made a little centre bit with a lucky money packet and a red Christmas bow.

Here's how it turned out:

There are actually 3 dragons, but one is hidden in the shadows.  Hmm, not bad, I quite like it.