My sister Lokotei and I put this together several years ago. Our inspiration was the Mickey-shaped wreaths that adorn Disneyland’s Main Street during the holiday season.

There are a couple of ways you can make your own Mickey wreath. One well-publicized method is to take three wreaths in the proper proportions to each other and attach them together with floral wire and/or hot glue. But if you can’t find three proportionate wreaths, you can use our method, which involves one wreath and one garland. (Whichever method you use, though, make sure the different pieces match! That is, the artificial twigs and needles should all look alike, as though they could be part of the same piece.)

With the wreath-and-garland method, simply bend the end of the garland in a circle, adjust the size to make a good “ear” for your wreath, wire/glue in place, and cut off the rest with heavy-duty wire snips. Then do it again for the other ear. You can also, as we did, attach a loop of floral wire between the ears for easy hanging.

But that’s just the beginning. The real fun part is decorating Mickey! If your goal is to mimic the Main Street wreaths as closely as possible, wind a string of white lights through the wreath (or through the ears, if your main wreath came with lights already installed) and gather a few dozen ball ornaments in red, gold, and green, including both metallic and matte finishes and a few different sizes. Depending upon whether you intend the ornaments to be a permanent part of the wreath or not, either hang them normally with hooks or else run more floral wire through the loops for the hangers and secure them that way. The ornaments should cover the wreath pretty densely, but don’t forget to leave room at the bottom for the bow. Use red flocked ribbon with gold embellishment near the edges. Most craft stores sell devices for the easy construction of multi-looped bows, or you can find instructions online for doing it by hand.

Of course, there’s no reason you have to mimic the Main Street wreaths exactly. Use whatever ornaments you like, or just leave it “naked” like in the photo. Whatever floats your boat. You could even go recursive and hang it with the Mickey-shaped ornaments sold in the parks. In any case, feel free to share your variations on this famous Disneyland decoration!

I made this ornament (among many others, yet to be shared) last year, when my entire Christmas decorating theme revolved around Disneyland. Of all the Disneyland-related crafts I’ve posted online, it is by far the most popular—I even used it for my ID photo here on the blog!

Materials and Tools:

3” white foamcore satin ball ornament (Mine came from Gifts By Christine)

1/8” gold wired ribbon

1/4”-1/2” gold ribbon

Gold woven cord

Gold thread

Gold-headed decorative pins

Wire snips

Sequin pins

Assorted gold and silver sequins and confetti pieces

Gold and silver seed beads

Hot glue gun

Instructions:

It’s best to have a good, head-on photo of the clock face to use as a guide while assembling this ornament. Since you will be recreating a flat design on a hemispherical surface, you’ll need to distort it a little and employ curves in places to create the impression of straight lines. I started by tacking down the triangular shape of the “hat” and then adding the nose (1/8” gold wired ribbon) in order to set the proportions for the rest of the face.

The hat and the outer rim of the eyes are defined with gold thread, stretched around sequin pins like chain-link fencing around posts. This is probably the trickiest part of the whole project, requiring a delicate touch and a lot of patience. You might want to insert the pins halfway first, wrap the thread as tightly as possible without weakening it, then push the pins in the rest of the way.

The embellishment on the hat is made of a silver spindle-shaped sequin and two gold confetti spirals. The irises of the eyes are very small flat gold sequins held in place with gold seed beads and sequin pins. The pupils are gold cup sequins secured with gold-headed pins. I used wire snips to trim the pins down to a manageable size for the ball, cutting at an oblique angle in order to keep a point on them.

The mouth is gold woven cord, knotted at both ends (hidden behind the cheeks) in order to keep it from fraying and secured at the bottom of the curve with the tiniest dab of hot glue. The cheeks are silver cup sequins overlaying gold “sunburst” sequins, held in place with sequin pins and silver seed beads. The chin is another silver cup sequin held in place the same way.

So much for the front of the ornament.

The back is a simple collage of shapes that evoke other parts of the Small World exterior. My choices included gold and silver pinwheel and sunburst shapes (available from many sources) as well as various silver cogwheel shapes from Cartwright’s Sequins. A package of “number confetti” provided all ten digits in silver. All shapes are attached with sequin pins in a more-or-less random design.

The hanger for the ornament is simply gold ribbon looped through the plastic hoop at the top and knotted off.