If life hands you hazel branches...

When I nose around blogs and magazines, I often feel that one detail keeps jumping out at me. It seems to be everywhere. And either I hate it from the very depth of my heart (mustard yellow walls and fabrics!) or I end up loving it.



In the last months, it have been those willow wreaths that every shabby chic or hampton style home owns in overflow that keep staring back at me. So when I did some gardening for my parents (payment for mooching food...) and ended up with a bunch of young hazel branches, I decided to save them from being shredded. After all, if life hands you hazel branches, make a wreath!

And this is my creation. I want to state that it is nearly round. This is a point of pride, so please take note!

Step one was making the wreath. You need only branches. Willow, hazel, or any other kind of non-brittle wood. Willow can often be found close to bodies of water, however small, so go looking there if you don´t find any in your garden.

The wreath takes about twenty minutes to braid.

After cutting down the branches and stripping them of their leaves, I put them in a shallow bath for a couple of hours.

First, I formed a circle with one of the sturdier branches, fixing the ends by twisting them round each other. Then I wound the other branches around my first one, moving the starting points to get even volume.

The tension of the bowed branches will hold them fast. I bend the
thick ends in preparation before winding them in. The thin ends tended to break, but I just cut them off if that happened.

After I had used up all my branches, I let the wreath dry. It quickly turned from slightly green to pure brown (which I prefer).

For spring, I wanted to add some colour.

For the decoration, you need two pink satin ribbons (one slim, one broad), a couple of tiny glass bottles and some bellis flowers.

I wrote down "Frühling" (meaning "spring") in word, using a different font for every letter. I spaced the letters so I had enough space to cut them for my bunting.

Then I did a google image search for " newspaper". I immediatly found a cool one, copied the grafic into word and printed it. Then, I printed my letters on top of it. Next, I cut out a dragon shape around each letter, folded it in the middle and glued it to the slim ribbon.

I fixed the bunting and the tiny bottles on my wreath. I used the large ribbon to hang the wreath to my door. Then I filled
the bottles with water and put in pink bellis.

Now spring greets me every time I come home!

I am linking to these cool parties: