Here Are My Wreaths and Centrepieces That I Made Inspired by Pop Culture Animations

There is something quietly magical about taking a beloved animated world and turning it into something you can hold in your hands. I have been crafting holiday wreaths and table centrepieces for years, but somewhere along the way I realized that the most satisfying pieces I ever made were the ones rooted in stories I genuinely love. Not the generic red-and-green garlands or the predictable snowflake-and-pinecone arrangements, but pieces that made people stop in the doorway and say, “Wait — is that a Totoro?” Yes. Yes it is. And I could not be more proud.

Over the past few seasons I have been quietly building a collection of animation-inspired wreaths and centrepieces, and I want to share them all here. Some were made as gifts. Some now hang on my own walls or sit on my dining table. A few were complete disasters before they became the things I am most proud of crafting. All of them came from a deep appreciation for the animated stories that have shaped the way I see colour, character, and wonder.

Whether you are a seasoned crafter looking for your next project or someone who just finished rewatching a favourite animated film and thought, “I want that world in my home,” I hope this post gives you ideas, inspiration, and maybe a little courage to try something unexpected.

Why Animation Makes Such a Perfect Muse for Wreaths and Centrepieces

Before I get into the individual pieces, I want to talk about why animated films and series are such a rich source of inspiration for this kind of craft specifically.

Animation is a visual language built on bold choices. Colour palettes in animated worlds are intentional in a way that live-action rarely achieves. Think about the dusty lavenders and warm golds of the spirit world in Spirited Away, or the deep teals and blacks of the ocean in Moana, or the saturated reds and purples of Encanto’s Casa Madrigal. These palettes are designed by entire teams of artists to evoke mood instantly, which means when you translate them into physical materials — ribbon, foliage, florals, ornaments — they carry that emotional weight with them.

Characters in animation also tend to have iconic, immediately recognisable design elements. A single spiralled horn. A specific shade of blue. A five-pointed star. A butterfly. A spinning castle. You do not need to recreate an entire scene to communicate the world you are referencing; a few carefully chosen symbols placed in a wreath or centrepiece are enough to tell the whole story. That constraint actually makes the craft more interesting because it forces you to think about what is most essential about a thing you love.

Finally, animation spans every mood and aesthetic. You can go whimsical and soft with a Studio Ghibli piece, gothic and dramatic with an episode of Arcane, bright and maximalist with Encanto, or cool and architectural with a piece inspired by the clean lines of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. There is an animated world for every style of home and every type of crafter.

The Totoro Forest Wreath

This was the piece that started everything. I made it after watching My Neighbour Totoro for the fourth or fifth time with my niece, and I kept thinking about the way Miyazaki draws forests — all layered greens, soft mossy shadows, and the feeling that something large and gentle is watching from between the trees.

I started with a grapevine base rather than a foam ring because I wanted the woody, organic texture to show through. I layered three different shades of faux eucalyptus — a silvery green, a deeper forest green, and a pale sage — and added dried moss in clumps to create that uneven, living-forest floor texture. I tucked in a few dried mushrooms (the kind you find at craft stores for autumn arrangements), which felt right for the ecosystem Totoro inhabits.

The centrepiece of the wreath, quite literally, is a small felted Totoro figure I made using a needle-felting kit. He is seated in the lower third of the wreath, slightly off-centre, just as you would expect a creature who lives between the ordinary and the magical to position himself. Around him I added tiny white soot sprite pom-poms — those tiny six-legged dust creatures from early in the film — half-hidden under leaves and peeking from the moss.

The colour story is all deep greens, warm browns, and soft greys. No sparkle, no glitter. This wreath does not want to call attention to itself. It wants you to discover it quietly, the way you discover Totoro himself.

The Encanto Butterfly Centrepiece

If the Totoro wreath is about restraint, the Encanto centrepiece is about joyful excess. Encanto is a film that refuses to be subtle about its beauty, and the centrepiece I made in its honour refuses as well.

I built this around a low, wide arrangement for a dining table — the kind of centrepiece that invites conversation across it rather than blocking the view. I used a long rectangular tray and filled it with a combination of real and faux elements. The base is a bed of tropical leaves: monstera, bird of paradise, and large palm fronds in bright, saturated green. Rising from that base are stems of bright yellow, gold, and warm orange flowers — I used silk marigolds because they hold their colour beautifully and they felt right for the magical, warmly Latin world of the Madrigal family.

The defining element, though, is the butterflies. Encanto is full of them — they appear in the opening sequence, flutter through magical moments, and are particularly associated with Isabela’s power. I ordered a large set of decorative paper and wire butterflies in every colour: yellow, orange, deep purple, cobalt blue, emerald green. I wired them to thin bamboo skewers at varying heights so they appear to hover above the arrangement at different levels, as though they have just arrived or are about to depart.

I added a few small gold candle holders within the arrangement (battery-operated tea lights for safety) because the warm glow at night makes the whole thing look like a scene from inside the Casita itself. When the light catches the iridescent wings of the butterflies, it is hard not to feel a little enchanted.

The Howl’s Moving Castle Autumn Wreath

I have a particular obsession with Howl’s Moving Castle, and I have made three different wreaths inspired by it over two years. The one I am most happy with takes its colour palette from the Ingarian countryside scenes — those rolling hills in warm amber, burnt orange, and deep russet that appear in the film’s quieter moments.

This is an autumn wreath, meant for September through November. The base is a thick foam ring covered in a warm caramel-coloured dried grass. I layered in dried orange and red leaves, preserved in glycerine so they keep their colour, along with sprays of dried wheat and oat grass that give it a textured, windswept quality.

The architectural element — representing the castle itself — comes from a few pieces of dark clockwork-style brass gear ornaments that I wired into the lower-left quadrant of the wreath, just slightly buried in the foliage as if the castle is cresting a hill. I added a few tiny dried roses in deep burgundy, because Sophie’s hat shop and the flower-filled transformation sequences in the film are inseparable from the story.

The finishing touch is a tiny hinged door charm, copper-coloured, nestled just above the gear cluster. If you know the film, you know the significance of doors that open onto impossible places. If you do not know the film, the door charm looks like a beautiful accident of texture. I love that ambiguity.

The Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Holiday Wreath

This one was the most technically ambitious piece I have made, and the one I get asked about most often when people see it.

Into the Spider-Verse has one of the most singular visual identities of any animated film ever made — the Ben-Day dots, the offset colour printing effect, the comic-book onomatopoeia, the way the frame rate shifts between characters. I wanted to honour that graphic design language in a medium that is inherently soft and dimensional, which is an interesting challenge.

I started with a plain white foam wreath base. Rather than covering it entirely with greenery, I used it as a canvas. I painted sections of the foam in blocks of colour — red, black, deep blue, and white — to approximate the look of a graphic novel panel. I used a sponge to apply a Ben-Day dot pattern over portions of the colour blocks using slightly darker shades, and sealed everything with a matte spray to keep the painted surface from smudging.

Into this graphic base I wove red and black ribbon in a web pattern across the lower half of the wreath. I added small plastic spider figures, painted red and black, and a few tiny superhero-scale ornament balls in deep red, midnight blue, and black. The centrepiece ornament is a custom polymer clay spider-symbol I made and painted in the distinctive Miles Morales red-and-black colourway.

Around the outer edge of the wreath I stencilled words in a comic-book font: “THWIP,” “WHAM,” and “INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE” in black against white sections. It sounds chaotic on paper but the high-contrast, graphic nature of the source material means it actually holds together visually.

This wreath works for the holiday season but honestly I keep it up well into January because it energises a wall in a way that has nothing to do with Christmas.

The Moana Ocean Centrepiece

For a summer party two years ago I made a table centrepiece inspired by Moana that has since become the piece I am most requested to remake for friends.

The base is a shallow oval bowl filled with a layer of aquarium sand in warm cream and gold. On top of the sand I nestled a collection of real shells gathered from various beach trips and a few purchased cowrie shells for texture. Rising from the centre of the arrangement is a cluster of tropical florals — birds of paradise, white plumeria, and bright orange heliconia — that reference both the island setting and Moana’s connection to the living natural world.

The water element is achieved with clear blue craft gel poured in a thin layer over the sand around the base of the florals. When it sets, it looks like a shallow tide pool surrounding an island of sand and shells. I embedded a few glass pebbles in the gel — blue, green, and clear — to catch the light in a way that reads as sunlight on moving water.

The nod to the ocean itself, the living character of the film, is a translucent blue glass wave figurine I found at an antique market, positioned at the edge of the bowl as if the ocean has just curled up to say hello.

I added a single small wooden canoe resting on the sand, because in every version of this story there is someone bold enough to sail beyond the reef, and I think that deserves to be remembered on the table.

The Arcane Hextech Centrepiece

This is the newest piece in my collection and also the darkest and most dramatic. Arcane, the League of Legends animated series, has a visual identity that mixes Victorian industrial steampunk with magical bioluminescence. Blues, purples, and cold teals glow against deep charcoal and black. It is a stunning palette for crafting if you are willing to commit to the drama of it.

I made this as a centrepiece for a winter dinner party with a gothic aesthetic and it was the conversation piece of the evening.

I built the arrangement in a tall black candelabra-style holder at the centre, then surrounded it with a ring of deep purple and midnight blue florals — artificial dahlias, black calla lilies, and deep burgundy roses. The foliage is dark: near-black eucalyptus and deep green ivy trailing across the table surface from the central arrangement.

The Hextech element — the magical blue crystals that power the technology in Jinx and Vi’s world — is represented by clusters of large blue and teal craft crystals and geodes I purchased from a geology supply shop. These are positioned at the base of the arrangement and wound with thin fibre optic wire that pulses with cool blue light when plugged in. At a dinner table in candlelight, with the fibre optic light pulsing slowly through the dark florals, the effect is genuinely arresting.

I added a few tiny gear and clock parts from a jewellery-making supply kit, scattered through the florals as if the boundary between Piltover and Zaun is bleeding through the floral arrangement. Which, thematically, feels exactly right.

Tips for Making Your Own Animation-Inspired Pieces

If you want to try this yourself, the process is more accessible than it might look. A few thoughts from my own trial and error:

Start with the palette, not the character. Before you go looking for figurines or character-specific ornaments, pull the three to five colours that define the animated world you love. Build your wreath or centrepiece around that palette first. The colours will do most of the storytelling work.

Choose one iconic object to serve as your anchor piece. A small figurine, a symbolic charm, a distinctive shape. This becomes the focal point that ties everything back to the source material without requiring you to make the whole piece feel like merchandise.

Do not be afraid of mixed materials. The most interesting animation-inspired pieces I have made combine natural elements like moss, dried flowers, and wood with more manufactured materials like painted foam, fabric, and resin. The contrast in texture reads as intentional and sophisticated rather than cluttered.

Allow yourself to be personal. The reason these pieces mean something is that they connect to stories that genuinely matter to you. Do not make a Ghibli wreath because you think it will photograph well. Make it because Totoro has lived in your heart since you were seven years old, and you want him near the front door when you come home.

Final Thoughts

Every wreath and centrepiece I have made has taught me something, both about craft and about why we love the stories we love. When I was felting that Totoro, sitting at my kitchen table at eleven o’clock at night, I was also thinking about what it means to believe in something you cannot fully see. When I was stringing crystals through the dark florals of the Arcane centrepiece, I was thinking about the way that show portrays the tragedy of systems that fail the people they were supposed to protect.

The animations that inspire us are not just pretty pictures. They are emotional architectures — carefully built worlds that taught us to feel things we did not have language for yet. Making something with your hands from those worlds is a way of honouring that. It is a way of saying: this story mattered. It still does.

I hope you make something. I hope it surprises you.