Pinecone wreath= not the success I was hoping for

So, back a few months ago, I found an old Southern Living magazine (we're talking "so-old-I-have-no-idea-how-we-still-have-it"old... 2007).  And while I was flipping through, I snapped a couple of pictures with my phone of pages that had decorating ideas that I loved.  One of them was this pic from a Kirkland's ad that was a pinecone wreath:

As you can tell, when I was going back through my phone pictures and stumbled across this a couple of weeks ago, it was a little too blurry to see the details, and I couldn't really remember what it looked like.  But I decided that since I loved it so much, and since I had the general idea of what I needed to do, I was going to make my own version of this wreath... and here it is.

I just cut out some cardboard in a square shape, and then cut a square out of the middle also.  Then I painted the cardboard and hot glued the baby pinecones on.  Super easy project.

Sadly, after I finished my wreath, I went back last week and searched for the Southern Living and found the ad again. I wanted to see how my wreath turned out in comparison to the original.  Bad idea.  I wasn't super thrilled with my pinecone wreath anyway, but I was fine with it. Then when I found the original picture and COULD see all the details (why didn't I try to do that earlier- before I made the dumb thing???), I realized that mine is not even close to the Kirkland's wreath :(  Here's a more clear picture from my camera- of what my inspiration was.  And you can actually see the details:

I love that they used different sizes and colors of cones and that they're all laying in different directions.  Way cooler than my boring one!  Oh well.  I'm not gonna throw mine out... but it's made me realize how far I have to go before I'm at Martha Stewart's level :)