Garlanding is a lovely way to bring fresh foliage into the home at Christmas. It can be used to decorate your tables, shelves, mantlepiece or if you’re feeling ambitious you can even tie it to banisters to create real impact.
In this how-to guide I will show how to make your own, it’s easy and fun to do and if you collect foliage from your garden it’s very inexpensive. If you decide to have a go let me know how you get on in the comments below.
The first thing to do is to gather your materials. You’ll need some thin rope or if you don’t have any then use a few strands of twine knotted or platted together. You’ll also need some sharp secateurs and some reel wire. The foliage you use is completely up to you but my advice would be to choose evergreen foliage as it is much tougher and won’t wilt as quickly out of water. I’ve used spruce, cyprus and senecio in my garland. I like to choose foliage with a variety of textures as it creates a more interesting look.
Decide on how long you want your garland to be and then cut your rope a few cms shorter as the foliage will extend out at one end. Before you start to construct your garland cut all the foliage down to shorter lengths, I’ve cut mine to between 10-15cm, if you want a looser look keep a few pieces longer.
Gather a few pieces of foliage (3 or 4) and hold together in a bunch, then using the wire, bind this bunch to the end of your rope. Continue adding small bunches binding them on with wire, overlap the bunches so that you are working back on yourself. Make sure that you fan the bunches out when you place them, so one to the left, one to the right and then one in the middle, continue like this until you run out of rope.
To finish, add you last bunch and cut the stems to that they are flush with the end of the rope, wrap the wire around a few more times and then cut and tuck the end into the foliage so that it wont scratch you or the surface you place it on.
How you style it after that is up to you. Adding candles always looks great, you could also place small vases of flowers in amongst the garlanding. Best of luck and Merry Christmas x
