Dried hydrangea wreaths are fun to make, easy and are a beautiful decor addition to any home or office. You can either dry your own hydrangeas or buy some from a floral or craft store already dried. The biggest trick to drying your own is when you cut them. If you cut them too early in mid summer, they won't dry correctly. Try to cut them right before the first anticipated fall frost.

To harvest and dry your hydrangeas, cut them and strip all leaves off of the stems. Either hang them upside down in a darkened room to dry or simply put in a vase to dry, but again a darkened room works best to preserve the color. Try picking blooms off different plants if possible to have a variety of colors to work with.

Pick the type of base you want to use for a wreath. My personal favorites are either Styrofoam or grapevine type wreath bases. Take some floral wire and wrap it around the wreath, then form a loop of the wire to hang from the wall, and then wrap the wreath again. You might try hanging it from the wall at this point to make sure it lies correctly, and then make any needed adjustments while the wreath is bare.

For a Styrofoam base, use a low melt point glue gun. Separate each bunch of hydrangea heads into smaller florets. Glue each to the wreath base, poking the stem into the base at the same time. Space the blooms over the surface of the wreath from top and bottom, left to right, inside and outside of the base until you completely fill it in.

Balance is what you are looking for. Balance in shape, you don't want any sticking out way above the others, you don't want one side of the wreath to be fuller than the other. Try stepping back and looking at a distance and just think balance of shape.

The second area to look for is balance of color. This is the purpose of doing each bloom all over, then filling in, so you achieve that balance of color. Give another once over to check on that.

Now that your wreath is complete, you may want to leave it with this plain, simple look. You also may want to add baby's breath or other dried florals to it, or a bow. Experiment with the type of look you like.

For a grapevine base, the concept is the same as above. If you want to add bows or ribbons, glue them first to the base then glue to hydrangea flowers on it around them. Sometimes bare spaces looks nice to allow sight of the grapevines. Experiment on the design you like.

Try to avoid sunlight in the place you hang your wreath as it will drastically reduce it's life. You can redo the wreath each year by simply stripping off last year's blooms and replacing with the current year's, for a fresh wreath each year.

Many times people expect dried floral arrangements to last forever, and are disappointed when they start looking bad after a few years. This is a misconception. Expect them to look good for about a year, that's really about all they were meant to last.