"A Marshmallow World" Wreath

When I painted the door orange in the summer, I wasn’t really thinking about Christmas. Turns out my existing outdoor Christmas wreaths clashed terribly with orange so I googled “Christmas wreaths on orange doors.” All I came up with were orange wreaths.

And then I found this. White seemed like a great idea! And who doesn’t love marshmallows? What I didn’t know is that marshmallows have gotten expensive since I last bought them. Really? $7 for a bag of puffed air and sugar?

But I’d already bought the styrofoam ring so there was no going back.  I took the materials to my dad’s while I was dad-sitting and dove in. It was pretty easy and surprisingly, the marshmallows tasted ok with my chestnut beer.

I started by wrapping the foam ring with white florists tape, so it wouldn’t look styrofoam-y if there were any spaces showing. About 1/8 of the way through, I realized I wasn’t putting the marshmallows close enough together so I had to start again. They should be mushed up to each other pretty close.

The white floral tape was the same roll we used when we made the bouquets for my wedding.

I had decided to buy original sized and small marshmallows - not the jumbos. I bought 2 1-kilo bags and it was too much. I’d say you could cover a 14-inch ring with 1.25 kilos. I filled in the spaces with the mini marshmallows.

So many marshmallows.

I used the flat toothpicks mostly, because that’s what I had. However I did have about 30 round toothpicks and those worked much better. I poked the toothpick into the foam, leaving about a third poking out. The amount of toothpick that pokes out should be slightly shorter than the marshmallow so it doesn’t stick through.

Pretty sure those are vintage toothpicks in the box with blue writing. They were my mom's circa 1972 and were way, way stronger than today's product.

The exact moment I realized I needed these babies to be closer together. Remove and restart.

When you stick the marshmallow on, you give it a bit of push to snug it in. Unfortunately, some of the marshmallows came off in about an hour, as they relaxed their shape. I just gently put them back in. 

Almost done!

Having second thoughts at this point, but I soldiered on.

By the next morning, a bunch more had fallen off. Hmm. Obviously I couldn’t glue gun them in, so I made some Royal Icing and glued them to the form and to each other. Just like for a gingerbread project. Look here for my Royal Icing recipe, but a good rule of thumb is 1 egg white per 1 cup of icing sugar. In this case I added about 1/4 cup more icing sugar because I wanted it thicker so it wouldn’t drip off the wreath.

Plop. Plop. Well that's annoying.

The answer: Royal Icing to glue it together. Blends in nicely.

The other thing I didn’t think about in advance was how it was going to be hung. The internet lady just wrapped a ribbon around it and tied a bow. My wreath seemed to heavy for that to work so I got some silver wire and looped it around the ring, being careful not to disturb the marshmallows. This should have been the first step, IMO and in retrospect.

A bit tricky to do at this stage. Instructions would have been handy.

Next up was making the bow. I had bought this really cool glittery silver ribbon because I thought silver and white would be pretty. Unfortunately I had a really hard time working with the ribbon and the bow looked like a three year old made it. Luckily Julien was there to lighten the mood and he found a website called “pinterest fails” (or something similar) and we had a laugh looking at hilarious pictures of other people’s unfortunate attempts to replicate Pinterest projects. That’s not what Pinterest is for, people. It’s for looking at and sorting and dreaming. I did not take a picture of my Pinterest-fail bow. You’ll have to just imagine it.

Plan B was some green velvet ribbon I had lying around. With a little finagling, I got that sucker tied up and attached to the wreath so that it would hide the silver hanging wire. (The wreath is now covered in sparkles from the failed bow attempt and it actually looks pretty nice. What doesn’t look nice is dad’s kitchen floor which is still covered in sparkles even though I washed it, like, three times. Oops. Sorry dad.)

When I brought the wreath home Paul laughed out loud and said I should take a picture. It’s nice to know that after all these years, I still amuse him. He suggested adding some colourful bits to it, but I think he missed the point - which was a wreath that didn’t clash with orange.

I let it sit for a day or two so the marshmallows would dry out a little and then hung it on the (orange) door.

It was a fun project! And it gave me some laughs when I needed them most.

So pretty, right?