If you’ve bought the Christmas tree and have little left in your budget for wreaths, baubles and other festive garlands, take a walk in the countryside for twigs, sprigs and berries which will make pretty adornments – and save you pounds!
Ideal material for adding natural beauty to festive scenes indoors include crab apples, hazel, dogwood, berried ivy, holly, silver birch stems, as well as a variety of seed heads and pine cones.
Clippings from your Christmas tree can make the base of a fabulous wreath, using a wire frame wrapped in moss and secured by florist’s wire. Take the tree clippings and feed them into the frame from their stems, making sure all the sprigs face the same way. Again secure with thin wire, circling it all the way around the frame, and then add holly or other evergreen additions, along with pine cones which you can secure with wire or glue, baubles and colourful ribbon for a bow at the top or bottom.
The colourful stems of dogwood also make an easy indoor or outdoor wreath. Weave the most colourful stems together, wiring the first one to create the frame and then weaving subsequent stems around it.
Holly spheres are also easy to make, using a dry oasis ball, strong curling ribbon or raffia and florist’s wire. When you are picking your holly, use end pieces, allowing for two to three pairs of leaves and then trim the bottom pair of leaves off so you have an inch of clear stem. Pierce the ribbon with a piece of wire so you can thread the wire and ribbon right through the centre of the oasis ball, knotting the ribbon or making it into a loop at the bottom and securing it further by threading more wire through the loop and into the oasis, to secure the decoration when it is suspended.
At the top of the ball, wind the ribbon up to stop it becoming too creased and secure with a paperclip, held with one hand while inserting foliage with the other.
Starting at the top of the sphere, put in pieces of holly around 2.5-3in long, adding small bits of conifer as you go, working around the ball until it is all covered. By eye, make sure the foliage is even and fill in any gaps with other evergreens. Thuja ‘Rheingold’ is a great ornamental golden conifer to stick between the holly sprigs. You can also use ivy with clusters of berries, leaving the last two leaves of the ivy and the berries, which will fill it out and give the sphere a different dimension.
Other bits and pieces can also be added including seed heads and cones, which may be better glued on. Tie a bow at the top of the sphere with the remaining ribbon and then suspend it from your hanging basket bracket.
And at the Christmas table, create your own festive place settings with dried fruits or small bundles of cinnamon sticks, gluing small cones to the base so they can stand upright, to take florist card holders. The same natural materials can then be added to your Christmas crackers to match.