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About Allen
Holiday Wreaths
I enjoy making festive holiday wreaths and giving them to family and friends as a seasonal gift. It's fun to come up with new ways to create this traditional holiday decoration. Often the most challenging part of making a wreath is creating a form that will keep its shape over time. I've found several options such as an artificial wreath, Styrofoam ring, grapevine circle or wire hoop, can be used as a base. Then it is just a matter of attaching your own creative blends of boughs, fruit, berries and accents to the form. Once your materials are gathered, you can put several wreaths together in an afternoon.
Granny Smith Apple Wreath
Start with a fresh fir or spruce wreath from the garden center and embellish it with more foliage, dried flowers and berries. I wired bundles of juniper branches and some Chinese photinia foliage clipped from my garden to plump up the volume of the wreath. Try your own mix of needled and broad leaf evergreens.
Materials
- Fresh evergreen wreath
- Branches of needled and broadleaf evergreen boughs
- Dried plant material (I used hydrangea blossoms)
- Green hypericum berries
- 15 Granny Smith apples (or others of your choice)
- Ice pick
- Pruners
- Coated florist wire (packaged in premeasured lengths)
- 1 roll of florist wire
- Light green floral spray
Directions:
- Create bundles of evergreens by clipping 8 to 10-inch stems and wiring the ends with floral wire. Add the bundles to the evergreen wreath to give it a full look.
- Push an ice pick through the center of the Granny Smith apples. Thread pre-measured lengths of coated florist wire through each apple. The coating on the wire keeps it from slicing through the apples while they are hanging on the wreath. Hang the apples in clusters of three evenly spaced around the wreath.
- Add accents of dried hydrangea blossoms attached with floral wire. Last summer I gathered up some flowers from my bushes and air dried them. Some had a slight green cast and others dried to a soft tan. If you want to give your blossoms a little extra color, spray them with a light green floral spray. They are also available at the craft store in presprayed colors.
- Strip the leaves from the hypericum berries and if needed create bundles to create a cluster with the floral wire. Attach them to the wreath with more wire.
- This wreath will be a bit heavy, so if you are going to hang it to a door or gate, make sure you securely attach both the top and bottom of the wreath to the door, so it won't fall off.
Moss Wreath – Create this moss wreath in a snap. Start with a grapevine wreath and use a glue gun to adhere pre-moistened handfuls of reindeer moss or lichen to the form. Floral U-pins are also helpful in securing the moss. Wire on a velvet ribbon and you're done!
Lemon Eucalyptus Wreath - Here's a fresh twist on a holiday wreath. Add wired bundles of clipped evergreens to cover an 18-inch artificial wreath. Insert and wire seeded eucalyptus branches to the frame in the same overlapping direction. Pierce 9 lemons near the top with an ice pick and push an 8-inch length of floral wire through the hole. Securely attach the lemons to the wreath using the wire. Then just tie on a big bow.
Berried Beauty - Rather than sprinkling a few red berries on a green wreath, why not cover the wreath with the same color of berry for a bold impact? To create this wreath, gather up a few supplies: a foam wreath form, floral wire, clippers, floral U-pins, and lots of branches of berries. This wreath requires a lot of berries so you may want to select a small wreath form and make sure you have enough berries to cover it.
This seasonal arrangement is an excerpt from the fourth book in my Garden Home Series, P. Allen Smith's Living in the Garden. Learn more about this book.
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