Some of you might not realize this but our Thanksgiving clothespin wreath is actually the OG. Yup, we created the very first clothespin wreath back in 2009! I decided to revisit the idea and crate a chic, modern clothespin wreath for fall, featuring paper flowers.

An easy way to paint clothespins

The first step of course is to paint the clothespins, and this can be time consuming because there are so many and they are so small. I've found the easiest way to paint lots of clothespins is to just keep them all clipped to the cardboard they come on, and paint a whole row at a time. If your clothespins came in a bag, just clip them to a scrap of cardboard.

I wanted the tips of these clothespins to be a different color than the rest of them, so I used some FrogTape painter's tape to mask them off.

Then I spray painted the tips a with a bright gold color.

When the gold paint had dried, I re-used the same pieces of tape to cover up the gold, revealing the unpainted parts of the clothespins. I spray painted them with a deep turquoise color.

Attaching the clothespins to the wreath

When the paint was dry, I clipped the clothespins onto a round wire wreath frame. I used 72 pins on my 12 inch frame.

Easy-to-make paper flowers

The wreath needed something more, and I am having a paper flower moment right now so I decided to decorate my basic clothespin wreath with some paper flower mums. I printed a template from the DIY Network onto lightweight card stock in the colors I wanted the flowers to be.

Once I had cut all the petal layers out, I curled the paper inwards by rubbing them with the blade of a pair of scissors. If the scissors don't work for you, you can also curl it by wrapping the petals around a small pencil.

Each layer of petals is numbered on this template, so that made it super easy for me to glue them together. I made sure to rotate each layer a little so the petals of each layer filled in the gaps from the layer below it.

As a finishing touch, I cut out a circle of a contrasting color to put in the middle.

Adding paper flowers and leaves to the wreath

Adding the flowers to the wreath was simple with a hot glue gun, and I also added some leaves that I made with the leaf pattern from the template. I just printed that page out onto green paper and cut them out to add fullness and another color level to the wreath. Before gluing anything to your wreath form, make sure you lay everything out so you are happy with the balance.

Besides the standard size flower that the template makes, I also made larger ones by just increasing the PDF size to 150% when I printed it. I had to adjust my print area since all the petals wouldn't fit on one sheet anymore, but it was worth it — I love the effect of having slightly different sized flowers.