August 1996
As the holiday season approaches, you will find many creative uses for natural materials in your decorating. Making wreaths and door swags has become part of a traditional evening for many families.
For indoor decoration, the best greenery are pines, firs, and cedars. Both hemlock and spruces are excellent for exterior wreaths, but when brought into a warm building may lose their needles within a week. Boxwood, yews, and holly also provide decorative greenery.
These wreaths or swags can be decorated with an assortment of fruits, nuts, and berries; including acorns, rose hips, gourds, bittersweet, and cones of most evergreens. In making "Della Robbia" types of wreaths, fresh fruits, such as oranges, small apples, lemons, limes, and kumquats are often used.
A novel addition to the traditional colored-ball tree ornaments are painted or gilded seed pods and seed balls. Seed pods of the honey locust, trumpet vine, wisteria, and milkweed -- and the seed balls of trees, such as sweet gum and sycamore -- provide excellent materials. Painted gold or silver,or with a bright-colored enamel, they can add sparkle to the Christmas tree.
The seed pods or balls should be allowed to dry. If given several coats of clear shellac before painting, they should last indefinitely without falling apart. The paint is most satisfactorily applied by dipping or spraying. Hangers can be made from florist's wire or ribbons.
The evergreen ball is an unusual use for short sprigs of evergreen. First, shape a 4- to 6-inch ball of moistened sphagnum moss firmly, but not too solidly, and tie it with wire or string or wrap in chicken wire. Then fasten a long piece of wire to the ball so it can be suspended from a chandelier, doorway, or window.
After the base is prepared, cut small sprays of greenery (5 to 6 inches long) and sharpen their ends. Insert the sprays into the moss until the entire surface if covered -- much the same way as "pomander balls" used to be made by inserting cloves into an orange until the entire surface was covered. Make the evergreen sprays form an even, well-rounded ball. As a final decorative touch, a many-looped bow of red ribbon or a number of cones or small bells may be wired to a small, sharpened stick and inserted.
A miniature Christmas tree can be made in a similar manner from a cone of chicken wire filled with slightly moistened sphagnum or wood moss. Single sprays of evergreen (4 to 6 inches long) are then inserted firmly into the moss base to outline a very bushy miniature tree.
They can be decorated in the traditional way, but a novel ideas is to use cellophane-wrapped, multi-colored lollipops. Insert them into the moss base as you do the evergreen sprays. But better include some cranberries wired together and inserted too -- the lollipops have a strange way of vanishing with children around!
To give an extra touch to your gift wrapping, add a branch of greenery and some small cones. Small sprays of white pine or fir are excellent for this. If you prefer additional color, brush the sprays of greenery with glue, varnish, or liquid wax, then dip the greenery in artificial snow or glitter.
(From "Holiday Decorations," by Diane Relf, Extension Specialist, Consumer Horticulture, Virginia Tech, in Home and Garden Notes, Volume 12, Number 12.)