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!

My wreath after adding greenery, some ivy flowers and a few red berries - secateurs at rest in the middle of the wreath

HOW IT STARTED…

My completed wreath complete with decorations - including a large silver bow, golden lotus flowers, cinnamon sticks and dried citrus fruit

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!)

A full length shot of the completed wreath on our dark grey door - which really sets off the silver bow
A closer look at the golden lotus flowers, along with yew and ivy greenery, some ivy flowers and red hawthorn berries
A closer look at the bow at the top of the wreath, the silver ribbon has wire in the edges and some transparency, the tails are long (to the bottom of the wreath) but aren't included in the photo

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!

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.

Tall orange and yellow illumninations circling a central pond with smaller lights on its edge, in the background a large tree lit up with blue lights
Walking through an archway of rainbow coloured gladioli-like flower illuminations

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.

Mature trees lit with pink, blue, yellow and green lights - in the distance is a rainbow tree
On the left a tree lit bright pink and blue/green, the word Belton in lights alongside it and the rainbow striped tree behind the illuminated letters

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.

Trees in the distance lit in reds and pinks, fountains on the lake lit in the same colours with the shrubbery in the foreground a vivid blue

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!

A rather large robin shimmering above the pedestrians

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.

White fairy lights strung into an arch leads you towards the exit of the gardens and display, quite spectacularly

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!

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Repurposing my autumn wreath

17 October I went to a workshop to make my autumn wreath, and almost a month and a half later it was still looking pretty respectable, if not slightly weather worn, which given the weather we’ve had - rain, wind and snow - isn’t surprising! And with a new workshop, and wreath, booked in for the start of December its days were numbered.

My autumn wreath fading a little on our open door

And while the autumn wreath was fading, it wasn’t completely done - which was just as well as I had plans for it.

Back in 2016 I shared how I’d bleached some pine cones, and how my top tip was to start early - I think I took my own advice there as I’d not used them properly, so by my reckoning eight years is plenty early enough!!

This year was going to be their year

At least I hoped it was.

I brought in the autumn wreath as by now the weather was too chilly to do this outside, and was immediately grateful that I thought to put this on a towel and on paper. It was wet from the recent rain, which was no bad thing as keeping the moss wet helps. The towel soaked some of that up, and the white paper helped easily identify bugs crawling out of it.

The autumn wreath on my kitchen worktop, plus towel and paper, before trimming the most faded elements.

I snipped off the Chinese Lanterns and some of the more faded greenery and the berries which were past their best, but left as much as I could.

To check the viability of this primping project, I placed my bleached pine cones around the wreath to check I had enough to fill the gaps. I did. So with more optimism than skill I set about wiring them into place. I had thin wire so I think this was harder to use than the thicker short lengths of florist wire which could be more easily pushed through the moss, but I go there and all the pine cones were attached successfully.

It doesn’t look too bad laying down does it?

I knew the proof of the pudding, or at least my newly acquired wreath making skills, would come when I held it vertical - and thankfully none fell off, so I could move to the next phase of the project - putting it on display.

The primped autumn wreath with newly acquired pine cones attached to our gate

Not taking any chances with the wind gusts, I’ve tied this on in four places - top, bottom and both sides - and it’s stayed on the gate, so far. What’s more, the pine cones have also stayed attached to the wreath, so I’m calling that a win - and a pretty and sustainable one at that.

Though this will be its last stand, with the majority of it heading to the compost bin (actually our brown bin as we haven’t sorted new compost bins yet) in the New Year. I’ll be saving the pine cones, and if I can the metal ring, but you’re not surprised by that are you?

This is likely to be my last post before Christmas, so thank you again for continuing to read and support my blog. I hope you have a great time over Christmas celebrating and/or spending time with families or loved ones, and doing what’s important to you.

We’re looking forward to spending the Christmas period with family in our new home. I hope to share a post of my Christmas wreath before the New Year, so I’ll save wishing you a Happy New Year until then.