Creating Christmas Wreaths

There’s something therapeutic about making wreaths from weaving the Willow base to building up the foliage and seeing the design appear.

At Bloomery we believe in using as many natural ingredients as possible to allow the designs we create return to and nurture nature after the event. I’m not a Willow artist, but I wanted to keep Bloomery’s Christmas wreaths as natural as possible, so I created the frames by weaving Willow circles using buff Willow purchased from Musgrove Willows in Somerset, with the smaller wreaths it was possible to create the frames without using any wire to hold the first Willow circle in place, for the larger wreaths I needed to use wire to hold the first branch in a ring and then could strengthen the circle by gradually adding more Willow. The foliage was then attached in small posies to create and build up the design on the frame by tightly wrapping binding wire around the design. All of the ingredients in our wreaths can be recycled or reused, the foliage can be added to the compost heap, the wire recycled and if the December weather is kind to us and not too wet the Willow rings can be reused next year.

Over the past months we’ve been collecting and drying out fir and pine cones from the Estate, I’ve found two types which is great as each of these are a different shape and give a different look to the wreaths. In the last few weeks I’ve been exploring the Estate further to find foliage that will last and look beautiful while drying out, there are a number of types of fir trees here that have different shaped branches and length needles these are great for varying the textures in the wreaths especially when combine with pine and Eucalyptus.