Rustic Barb Wire Wreaths

My son was married last summer and we hosted his wedding. His lovely lady, being a talented and thrifty girl, made most of the table centerpieces and planned everything. We helped as we could and one of the decorations we contributed were several barb wire wreaths that decorated the fences around the venue.

We have several old fences dividing the ranch that needed to be replaced and thus I had an abundance of perfectly rusted barb wire!

I spent the early morning taking down the fences and rolling up the barb wire. Now for the math, basically how big do the wreaths need to be and how many rolls do each one need to be?

It turns out this is a simple formula!
Circumference= diameter multiplied by Pi (3.14)

Decide on the diameter, we decided 20 inches was perfect and multiplied that by 3.14 so we needed 62.8 inches for each round. We wished to have six rounds for each wreath so 62.8 multiplied by 6 is 376.8 inches (31.4 feet).

So approximately 32 feet of barb wire was used for each wreath.

First things first, get a good pair of gloves, can not express this enough! Even tough cowboys use gloves repairing barb wire fences.

Stretch out a length of wire on the ground to the desired measurement then use heavy wire cutters to cut the wire.

Roll the wire in a circle about 20 inches in length (or your desired size) and as you roll, move the wire back and forth, utilizing the barbs to catch on each other and the wire to hold the wreath together.

The Wedding was all about sunflowers, burlap and navy blue so…….

We used a hot glue gun to attach our decorations but recently I have wired a bouquet of flowers together with florist wire and then tied the bouquet with a big ribbon onto the barb wire wreath. So either way works great.

So after a day’s work, we had 14 wreaths!

The wreaths were gorgeous hung on the fences and were given to family members as a memento of a beautiful wedding.

I had made two larger wreaths (24 inches in diameter) for the front gates of the Ranch. I change the decorations according to season and/or holiday
Please check back as the holidays roll by to see how we celebrate the seasons!

Here’s a sneak peak for Fall: