My Christmas (and now my Winter) wreath

I’m getting into this wreath making - and even though I made my latest wreath at the start of December as a Christmas wreath, I’m not ready to let it go yet so it’s be renamed my Winter wreath! I think that’s ok, don’t you?

For this workshop I headed over to a village outside Grantham meeting up my SIL for us each to make a wreath for our front doors (or in my case, as before, my back door!). I hadn’t realised the workshop was to be hosted in a private house and so struggled to find where I was supposed to be. Luckily though I stumbled upon a villager who was also attending and helped me, I’m so glad she did as it was a brilliant evening hosted by Chloe Jonason, along with expert wreath advice from Sarah at Sage and Satin Floral, who we discovered during the course of the evening lives in the same village as my SIL. A small world indeed.

But anyway, wreath making - entering into a room set up for the workshop with a large table in the middle and wreaths complete with moss laid out ready for easily 15 of us, with a huge pile of greenery in the centre of the table made quite an impact. The lebkuchen and mulled wine on arrival, and throughout the evening were also very much welcomed, though with a drive ahead of me in inclement weather the lebkuchen were very much more my thing!

HOW IT STARTED…

HOW IT ENDED…

Compared to my autumn wreath, this one has more decorations on which feels right for a more Christmassy effort - and it was good to learn how to wire these and attach them to the wreath. I’ve had one casualty - a cinnamon stick on our doorstep - which I’m quite impressed with, and used a very similar technique on my repurposed autumn wreath. Which reminds me I need to retrieve those pine cones and dry those before someone thoughtfully adds them to our brown bin…

Learning from my previous workshop, this time I had prepared my boot for the wreath’s journey home with a large piece of plastic and instead of moving it into the garage overnight, I left it in the boot! It was fine. In fact I didn’t hang it on my back door the next day either as I needed to make plans for storing the autumn wreath, and it was still fine. It’s still going strong and we’ve definitely had some weather in the last month or so, so I’ve also learnt that wreaths are pretty resilient.

It was only when I hung it on the door though, that I realised that my golden lotus flowers could have signified the Five Gold Rings from the 12 Days of Christmas, if only I’d thought to add another at the bottom. Never mind, it’s something to bear in mind for a future wreath, and as you’d expect I plan to remove the decorations, dry and store them for future use.

But in the meantime, enjoy a few more pictures of my newly renamed Winter wreath - I’ll let you know how long it hangs around for, and if there’s a replacement (though I’m pretty sure there will be one!)

Wreath making is definitely a skill I’m pleased I’ve added to my repertoire, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be scouring my garden for plants to use in future wreaths, as well as looking for places locally to forage materials, as my garden is unlikely to keep up with my new wreath habit for a little while yet!

Post Comment Love 5 - 7 January

Hello there, Happy New Year and welcome back to this week’s #PoCoLo - a friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any blog post published in the last week. Please don’t link up posts which are older as they will be removed from the linky, and if older posts are linked then please don’t feel that it’s necessary to comment on those. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked, comment and share some of that love.

We’ve had all the weather here - including a lot of rain; so much so that when we walked towards the River Trent on New Year’s Day it was easy to see that it was full again, and we’ve had more rain since. There’s just nowhere for the water to go at present, here’s hoping that the weather behaves more over the coming days and weeks so that the water tables can return to more normal levels, and that no more storms head our way (and I mean that for us all).

Our first Christmas in our new house was good, with lots of family visiting and plenty of memories made. We even had one of those rare nacreous clouds over our back garden, and while it’s not the greatest picture, that’s the photo I’m sharing this week. It was much more dramatic in real life.

Here’s wishing you all a happy and peaceful 2024, and here’s to another year of our friendly linky - please do pop over to some of the other posts and share some love, it’s one of my intentions to read more blogs this year.

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Enjoying the lights at Belton

Belton House isn’t that far from us, about 30 minutes or so drive towards Grantham, and it’s one of the places we’d visit whenever we were close by, it’s a lovely place - and I love the Orangery there - but somehow we hadn’t managed to get over there now that we actually lived closer - isn’t that always the way?!

In fact our last visit to Belton was a pretty special one, after viewing our house again and agreeing with the developers to proceed, we stopped at Belton on our way home. We wanted some time to reflect on the decision we’d just made, and wanted to do that in a beautiful space in the open air rather than in traffic on the A1.

Crazy I know.

But reflect we did and less than two months later we moved in to our new house, and we hadn’t been back to Belton since. So having seen their Christmas lights advertised we booked tickets for one of the off peak entries (the prices are crazy, even with free parking for National Trust members), but anyway, it was worth it - and a good way to mark our first Christmas out of London.

Once we’d found the way in - ahem, there were plenty of signs to get you close and to all the fairground rides, but the way in was less obvious to us, though I’m not sure why as it’s quite often the way we’d go into the garden anyway - clearly we were dazzled by the lights!

As you’d expect there was a planned route around the garden, which meandered along paths and took us further through the gardens/ parkland than we’d before. Next time we’re there we’ll be checking those areas out in the daylight! There were plenty of people there, but it didn’t feel overly crowded. There was a mulled wine and refreshments stop part of the way round, it was understandably busier there, but we didn’t stop and found it easy to get past those that had.

The lights were pretty spectacular, I think they had been refreshed and revamped for this year - and those on the lake were probably the most striking. But there was plenty to see, with something for everyone.

The bright colours of the flower-shaped lights really popped against the dark sky and I’m sure provided many Instagram-worthy locations. The next part of the garden focused more on lighting up the trees bringing a magical feel to them, and the walk through them.

The display at the lake was probably the most spectacular, and the one which benefitted most from the music which accompanied it. I have many iterations of this photo in various colour schemes, but this is the most striking and one of my favourite photos from our visit.

My favourite area when we visited was this quite simple triangular shaped tree section - the lights changed colour and was quite calming. They have a look of daleks about them, but what I didn’t realise until I edited my photos was that there’s an very subtle inverted tree amongst them - I think that makes me like them even more!

The other that I was particularly taken with were the robins - they were large - but it was their coloured shimmering metal discs that were impressive, like a large sequinned robin hovering above you!

The last archway that you walked through as you headed out of the garden was also pretty spectacular, and proves that simple isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but can be equally as magical.

So it was good to get back to Belton, and it’ll be even better to get back again in daylight - as the car park changes they’ve made in the past six months look to have improved that no end. No more parking in a muddy field, and that has to be a good thing!