Christmas gifts from your garden - spice wreath
A spice wreath has an additional benefit to its initial beauty - it can last for months. Assuming you work on a base of pine or Thuja, both of which are beautifully scented and resinous, you can hope that a spice wreath will still have an evocative fragrance in May or June of the following year.
You need
- Chicken wire
- Oasis or florist's foam
- Sprigs and twigs of scented evergreen
- Wire
- Tiny terracotta pots or little boxes
- Crepe paper in Christmas colours
- Dried lavender, hops, seed heads, pine cones etc from your garden
- Cinnamon sticks
- Cloves
- Wide paper ribbon
- Bright string or raffia
- Cotton wool
- Essential oils
Make the chicken wire into a long tube, fill it with the oasis or florist's foam cut into chunks to fit inside, and bend it to shape; hearts, squares, circles. ovals etc all work well.
Wire the evergreen sprigs and attach them to the wreath. Put wire through or round your little terracotta pots or your boxes and fill them first with cotton wool on which you've put a couple of drops of essential oil (cedarwood, frankincense, lemon, ginger and pine all work really well for this wreath), then glue a layer of flower heads, pine cones etc over the top to hide the cotton wool, and wire the whole item onto the wreath. Tie the cinnamon sticks together in little bundles and glue a flower head or hop to each one, and fasten them to the wreath as well. Put cloves and any cinnamon fragments, and loose lavender flowerets in small squares of crepe paper, tie them with raffia or string and wire them onto the wreath. Fill in gaps with ribbon and hang up.
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