(almost) totally free festive foliage extravaganza

If you follow me on Instagram (*points over to the sidebar*), you’ll have seen that we’ve been spending looooads of time in the woods lately, enjoying the cold, crisp days and gathering supplies for decorating. I mentioned in a previous post that I wanted to use more of natures goodies for decorating this year, keeping it simple and less…chaotic, and hit the jackpot when I discovered that our local country park had a pile of trimmed Christmas tree branches that were destined for the shredder. We struggled armfuls of them back to the car, mixed with some ferns and other evergreens, and I drove home thoroughly pleased (if a little squashed).

I knew I wanted to do some sort of green-arrangement-thingy (technical term right there, folks), but didn’t really know what. Then the lovely people at Funny How Flowers Do That got in touch to direct me towards the video below: (do watch it, it will change your flower-arranging life forever, I promise!)

So simple, but at the same time ABSOLUTE GENIUS. WHY have I never thought of using a sellotape grid to hold everything in place when I arrange my flowers? I grow a lot of cut and wild flowers in the garden in the summer, and always end up having a giant huff when they don’t stay where I want them to in the vase. But now, no more – because I have the Sellotape of Control! Ha! Ha ha!

In the end, I decided to just go for it with the greenery, and as the arrangement built up it actually ended up looking a little bit like a miniature Christmas tree. This made me stupidly happy, because our tree is older than Ben, and made of plastic – we wanted a real one, but couldn’t justify the cost when we had something that was fit for purpose in the loft. *Gives tree the side-eye.* So now we have the best of both worlds. Fist pump!

The sellotape trick is literally amazing; I’d put branches and twigs in place and then turn round to reach for something else – and when I turned back, they HADN’T MOVED. Once I’d finished, I popped in a few sticks of berries from Wild Damson (amazing, amazing shop in Petersfield that sells all of that rustic-country style stuff I love), stood back and admired it. Nothing moved, nothing fell over and there’s plenty of room to hang a few decorations from the branches (once, err, I’ve finished making them….). I couldn’t be more pleased!

The leftover greenery is going to go into jugs and pots, and smaller pieces are going to be tied onto garlands and around jam jars to create simple tealight holders. There will hopefully be a post before Christmas day, but I seem to have more posts than I do days to publish them at the moment!

This is a collaborative post.