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It’s no secret that my fireplace mantel is my very favorite spot in the house right now. It’s not just the sentimental fact that my dad custom made the mantel for me. The whole thing is just perfectly ME! I love it. I looked for a really long time to find the matching mirror over the mantel too. Against the high vaulted ceilings it doesn’t really look quite as huge as it really is! The mirror is BIG. And it’s also very heavy. All of this is relatively new, and I have only begun creating decor for my beloved Mantelscapes! One of my favorite things now is making wreaths to hang on the mirror! I love how my Christmas Yarn ball wreath turned out. I wanted to make one for Valentines Day too! Because the mirror is so big and heavy I’m not comfortable adding much weight on it. I needed a light weight Valentines Wreath. After a lot of thought, and much pinteresting I settled on Coffee filters and cardboard as a medium to make my Gilded Heart Wreath.

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Here’s what you’ll need to make your own Gilded Heart Coffee Filter Valentines wreath:

Coffee filters (just the standard size)
Cardboard cut into the shape of a heart
Ribbon
DecoArt Metallic Lustre in Gold Rush
Red acrylic paint
water
hot glue gun

The first step is to color your coffee filters. I left some of the filters white, but others I wanted to add some color to. In a small bowl, with 1/4 cup water, add a small amount of red acrylic paint (just a few drops) and mix. Then dip 1/3 of the coffee filters into the water, letting them soak it up. This turned them a pretty shade of pink! Set them aside to dry. Next, I took another 1/3 of my coffee filters and I added the Gold Metallic Lustre for a beautiful gilded gold look. I love this stuff so much! I added a little bit of water (just a few drops) to my Metallic Lustre and just painted it onto the edges of a bundle of filters.

Set those aside to dry. While your filters are drying, cut your wreath form from a large piece of cardboard. My wreath is going to be a solid heart.

When all of your filters are dry, you can start adding them to the cardboard heart! This process took a long time, and I used almost 800 coffee filters!

To make the coffee filter flowers, pinch the center of the coffee filter and twist.

Add a dot of hot glue to the cardboard and press the center of your twisted coffee filter flower onto the board.

Keep repeating until your heart form is full! You can add them as tightly, or loosely as you’d like. I squished mine in as tight as I could get them to make as many fit as I could. I liked the close tight ruffles!

If you want a faster wreath with fewer filters, spread the flowers out a little bit. Just make sure you’re covering the cardboard completely, it’s not pretty like those gilded flowers.

I love it so much! The picture doesn’t do the gilded flowers justice, they actually look like they have gold leaf on them! Because it’s made of paper, it’s not an outdoor/front door wreath. But it is perfect for the mirror over my fireplace!

I added a red ribbon loop to the back of the cardboard heart so that I could hang it on the hook mounted over the mirror. Because you can see the cardboard in the mirror reflection, I painted the back a light pink.