Skip to main content

Wreath Day : Yearly tradition


Making your own Christmas wreath.  It is definitely a tradition on the Pacific Northwest island where I live and surprisingly easy to do because the local nursery allows people to use their wreath making machines.  They even let you bring your own greens from home.  Just as long as you purchase their wire wreath forms. 
For my family and I, making a wreath is a two-day process.  Day 1 involves a hike into the woods near our home to find pine branches that have fallen to the ground.  Considering how many wind storms we have by December, there is always plenty to glean from the forest floor.  We quickly fill up our blue IKEA bags and head home. 

Day 2 involves a trip to the wreath making machine.  My son and I use clippers to fashion small little bouquets of varied greens, including pine and cedar and sometimes berries and rose hips.  This year, we had some eucalyptus to add a Southern Hemisphere touch to our holidays.  

Each bouquet gets placed carefully between the two prongs of the wreath form.  The prongs have already been aligned onto the sides of the machine.  There is a presser foot beneath the table.  The machine pinches the two prongs together when the foot is pressed down.  

Watch your fingers! 

As you can imagine, my 10-year-old and I do this job together! 

This year, we made a 20-inch one which, when finished, is almost too big for the door! 

And my son and I get to enjoy something that we created together for the rest of the holiday season. 




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buddha's Hand Citron : Distracting myself with rare fruit

My son's fourth grade teacher sent him on a mission... to the local produce section.  She had explained to the class that grocery stores will often stock up on different and interesting fruit during the days before Thanksgiving and that the best day to shop would definitely be Monday.   So, in spite of the fact that I really don't have much of a voice, we just had to get going!  This is what we took home with us.  Yellow tentacles reaching in all different directions, small and bumpy.  But with a really pleasing lemony smell.  It looked innocent enough. This was my introduction to the Buddha's Hand, a special kind of citrus fruit that is valued not only for its appearance but also for its sweet and flavorful rind.   Of course we didn't bother to Google what we could do with it until we actually had it home and were busy observing it on the counter.   We learned that our Buddha's Hand version was considered to be the open type, with...
Post a Comment
Read more

The First Post: In which I try to figure out how to deal with having no voice

The whole thing started in May with a bad cold and laryngitis that never seemed to get any better.  But that wasn't overly concerning because I'm a school librarian and use my voice all day.  Surely it will get better with vocal rest over during the first few weeks of summer. All through the summer, I attempted to get improve the hoarseness through a regimen of allergy medication and nose spray, as suggested by my doctor. By the fall and with the return of school, I knew that something more was up.   But there was always something else to take care of and I delayed in asking for another appointment. It was November before I finally made my way to an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor.  She looked down my throat with both of her scopes and then pronounced that I would need surgery.  She wasn't sure what was going on, but there was clearly something pushing up my on my false vocal fold that kept her from being able to see my true vocal chord on the right hand side....
Post a Comment
Read more