I saw a few attractive Waitrose winter wreaths a couple of weeks back and decided to make one using, where possible, naturally scavanged materials. I’d wandered around a few places over the last forthnight but had not felt motivated to walk around with a shopping bag full of twigs. With a weekend staying in Godalming, I decided to go equipped on an afternoon walk with a friend, Jen, in search of the fundametal ingredient, willow.
Willow is good construction material for all sorts of ‘bushcrafty’ projects like baskets or hats. Willow is flexible and can be woven to form a wreath, which is the first stage and then the other ingredients are used, in the second stage, to decorate. Anything you feel appropriate can be scavanged for decoration and it’s worthwhile searching for pictures of wreaths to get some inspiration beforehand. We’d decided on some holly (with berries), oak leaves, pine needles, pine cones and mistletoe. Equipped with the list of ingredients, a bahco laplander pruning saw, a simple Mora knife and the usual day bag; we headed off to Frensham Little Pond.
I’d not been before but had chosen the location because of the lake and I seem to notice Willow around water. Talking of water, Jen kindly captured me driving the Jeep through a Ford in slow-motion on my Samsung Galaxy S7. She got soaked.
We had cups of tea and some gorgeous choclate and cocunut-flavoured flapjack at the National Trust cafe and went on our meander around the lake. The lake and surrounding trail was lovely and we had an ugly duckling follow us around for the most part.
We collected most of the raw material, bar the mistletoe and started make the wreaths in situ.
We were out well over the estimated hour, for about three hours. The track can be viewed and downloaded as a GPX file below.
I finished constructing the bulk of the wreath and tied it off with sisal when I got home. The finished wreath looked like this and I’ve bunged in the airing cupboard for the next few weeks to dry slowly until I get round to decorating the wreath (part 2).
