Mossing a wreath base

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Wreath making: Willow from the wigloo

Christmas is coming and the wigloo's getting hairy…..

So it was off to join the Friends of Cotteridge Park on one of their weekly Sunday morning maintenance missions to tame the sproutings.  With loppers and secateurs in hand, Judith, of Pollen Floral Joy, and I squelched over the boggy grass to do some serious snippage in the late autumn sunshine.  Yes we are kind ladies, but not entirely altruistic ones.  We wanted willow, and we wanted lots….  Why?  To twist into wreath bases just in time for Christmas…. 

I've just signed up for another Christmas market, so its time to get twisty with those supple willow wands, and make circlets of the lovely green, flexible stems.  Some will have dried ingredients added, some might get mossed, and some might just get sprayed and glittered - a range of fates await them…

Working with willow is quite addictive as it is so versatile.  Bending and twisting the wands back into tidier tunnel and igloo shapes was incredibly satisfying.  After an hour of chopping and twisting, the wigloo looked a little tamer but it has filled my head with ideas of woven shelters for my own garden.  Maybe I'll stab a few willow whips into the ground and see if they take root of their own accord...

Heaven knows we came back with plenty of them!  Plenty to go round for my wreath workshops. I've already turned some into bases of various sizes ranging from the tiniest dolls house front door wreaths (napkin rings??) to monsters of about 80cm in diameter.

A necklace of crab apple and a feather of grass.

I've been grubbing around again….

Today's colour was definitely yellow.  The windfall crab apples in the school garden, the uprooted cotoneaster berries in a local skip and the rejected crocosmia seed heads sitting waiting for the green waste collection to come by for the very last time. (Birmingham is going over to wheelie bins for compostable waste, and a fee for using this service).  I also rootled through a bag containing magnolia trimmings - brought back memories of how magnolia saved my bacon on my first ever stall earlier this year.

My foraging sack, otherwise known as an H&M plastic bag, ranneth over on my way home from school:

With a bit of patient threading, spike trimming and mixing and matching, these bits were teamed up with items from my stockpile of natural goodies and became….

 … amongst other things.  Love the wisps of pampas grass heads on the white feathery one. Am quite taken with that.

Baublicious

Every year, my children get to purchase a new bauble for the tree and we have had some beauties - a handblown green glass globe strung on a velvet ribbon, a matt gold bauble frosted with a jacquard of glitter. And there have been horrors - plastic knobbly glitter peaches and bright blue monsters….

But you can't beat a bauble and I have not lost my childhood fascination for them - can still remember a small pale pink one with a scallop pattern of white glitter which I adored on the family tree for many years and the feeling of delight as I unearthed the segmented box in which it nestled when the decorations came out of hibernation each year.

Making lots of wreaths this year has given me an excuse to go bauble shopping and I've found some lovely clustered ones in a range of colours, finishes and sizes.  Here's today's wreath just pretending to have berries….

Dress up your doors (again!)

Ooh - so much fun to be had with this wreath making lark.  Decided after the previous post that I needed something brighter to go with my dark green front door.  A quick peer into my shopping bag of foragements, soon showed me the way to go. Variegated holly for starters - very splashy and bright. Next,  those lovely yellowy green dogwood stems had to figure largely, along with their festive red cousins.  Poked them into the wreath frame and wrapped them around it, wiring them to hold them in place.

For some added texture, pushed some fir cones between the stems (am hoping my children don't slam the door too hard and make them fall out!) and then went a wander round the garden on the hunt for more bright stuff.  All those angular bits of lonicera Baggensen's Gold seem to fit the bill, so spiked them around the inside and outside of the frame to break up the outline.

The only downside to this well-dressed front door is that our visitors will need to be hard-fisted door knockers throughout the festive season as we don't have a bell. Maybe such activity will restore circulation to their frost-bitten fingers?

On a softer and more scented note, played around with twigs and herb leaves to make an indoor wreath.  Made a base of sage, rosemary and lavender sprigs, then added the birch twigs, silvery honesty seed heads and a bit of blue spruce to fill in the gaps. I now get a lovely herby, resiny whiff every time I walk in the dining room.

I may have to adopt year-round wreath making as it is such a satisfying thing...

Tis the season to go foraging....

Spent the morning as the weirdo of the woods... or should that be the  mad lady in the park with floristry scissors?  Silver birch twigs, ivy flowers, fallen blue spruce branches, berries and yet more pine cones all got squirrelled away into my capacious Sainsbury's shopper.

On returning home, these were transformed into Christmas wreaths, made on a base of clematis stems that I couldn't resist making into frames when the thick, vine-like stems were felled along with various pear tree branches in February this year.

I love making wreaths. So satisfying and simple. Poke stuff into them, bind with wire, add a bit of this and that, and suddenly you have something so much nicer than the £6.99 holly boredom you can buy from every grocer on the high street.  Especially if you have discovered a brilliant stand of yellow and red dogwoods in the local park.

This is the one I made for my friend Jeanette, to be delivered tomorrow evening along with accompanying bottle of warming red wine....