Making An Autumn Wreath

We were lucky enough at our monthly WI meeting this month to have a fantastic speaker who gave us a demonstration on how to make a Christmas wreath. She showed us some beautiful wreaths and made it look so easy I thought I would have a go at making one for Autumn. Apart from the wire wreath frame (55p from the garden centre) everything came from my garden, even the moss which I raked out of the lawn!

This is how I did it.

1. You need to wire your moss to the wire frame using a reel of florists wire. I'm using a 12" frame.

2. Firmly shape the moss into ball shapes and attach them to the wreath ring. Wire them on passing the wire round and round through the ring. When you finish the moss, keep the reel of wire still attached to the wreath, ready to add the foliage.

3. You should end up with a covered ring. The moss needs to be damp, mine wasn't very damp so I watered it with a watering can before I attached the foliage.

4. Next choose your foliage, this is what I found in my garden. I used rosemary, eucalyptus, berried ivy, bay and lavender.

5. Snip into small sections and wire onto the wreath. You need to keep wrapping the wire around and around. Make sure that every side is covered. Thats it, its really that easy!

6. Heres my first wreath, and I'm so proud of it!

Wreath Tips

You should aim for 3 or 4 types of foliage.

You can use all sorts of accents for your wreath, once you have the background foliage you can add chillies, limes, apples, dried hydrangea head, pinecones, birch twigs, sprayed silver allium heads or poppy heads, honesty, hollyberries, orange slices.... They need to be pronged with a stubby florists wire and poked through and things like the chillies or orange slices look best in threes.

If your wreath starts to dry out you can submerge it in a shallow tray of water.

You can use a coat hanger shaped into a wreath shape if you can't get a wreath ring, but these should be available from florists or at your garden centre, or of course ebay.

You can pick a lot of foliage or berried things now (rosehips, berried holly etc) before they go over or get eaten (leaving some in place for the birds though) and keep for up to a month in a cold shed or greenhouse until you need them.