How To Make Wild Holiday Ornaments
For the month of December Garden Collage is rolling out a special feature for our GC readers: an interactive holiday calendar that celebrates the garden in the season of comfort and joy. Our GC Holiday Calendar features exclusive giveaways, gift guides, holiday beauty tips, video tutorials, recipes, and other fresh ideas designed to bring the garden into peoples’ lives.
December can often feel artificial and trite–its a time of year in which we’re inundated with plastic and pre-packaged goods that feel far from earth. In a return to the wild, our seasonal activity honors the holidays while keeping Lil’ Sprouts in touch with nature (even when the weather gets too cold to go outside).
Our GC Holiday Ornaments embody simplicity, evoking an old-fashioned, rural charm. They can be hung in windows or on doors to cheer up the home during the darker months.
Embracing the oft-forgotten vitality of winter flora, we selected seasonal plants in light, bright colors. We complemented the plants with natural fabrics like paper rope and baker’s twine to imbue the ornaments with a found quality–and to remind us (during the madness of holiday season) of the beauty in the unembellished character of nature.
Nora Mueller
Materials
- Sticks (collected from the garden or park)
- String (we used paper rope, baker’s twine, and embroidery thread–other organic materials like coarse twine or burlap also work)
- Plants (look for interesting textures that will dry beautifully, like herbs; you can also start with fresh herbs)
- Scissors
Nora Mueller
Directions
- Arrange sticks in square, diamond, or cross shapes–or just bundle flowers together.
- Wind your choice of string around the point where they meet, making sure to keep the string taught so the structure will remain secure. In general, the sticks will form the “frame” and the soft foliage will be the adornment.
- Choose where the ornament will hang from, and wind additional string around this point, leaving a length of string long enough to be tied around a branch.
- Select flowers, herbs, or other plants and attach them with string to the stick structure.
- Attack ornament to hanging string and enjoy!
