FrenchGardenHouse Holiday Home 2013

Welcome to my Holiday Home! I love this season the most don’t you? Our holiday decorating here at home is a little behind, as we are in the midst of a kitchen remodel, but it’s almost done. Oh! Then the decorating can begin. In the meantime, let’s start at our front entry.  In years past, I have decorated our front gate with all natural greens, antique frames, each year I love to think of a different “look” to surprise our guests, and to delight my own senses. This year, my eye was caught by over the top glamour!

For this wreath, I used chartreuse green gold and silver ornaments.  {Want to know a secret? They are plastic. Unbreakable, and perfect for using outside.} I will be sharing the very easy DIY at the end of this post. It’s so easy, everyone can do this! You don’t even need a hot glue gun.

The glittered cone is paper, I bought it just like this, but you could easily make your own, too, and cover it with glitter.

The black urns on our front walkway are usually planted with evergreens at this time of year, but here in our California weather, my French lavender is still doing so well I didn’t have the heart to replace them.  So I added a few of the ornaments placed randomly around the urn so they could join the festivities.  Planters=done!

The plants on our antique French rack by the front door also got the ornament treatment. The ivy “tree” in the black urn is simply an ivy wound around an antique metal garden topiary frame.  I added a perky Chartreuse bow on the very top, and little clusters of different sized ornaments {strung on florist wire} here and there.

The antique rolling cart by the door is adorned with a bunch of  {faux} evergreens and berries.  The burlap bag disguises a secret spot for Mr. FrenchGardenHouse and Bentley, our almost two year old Labrador to place their endless collection of balls they find on their journeys together in the field across the street.  My gardening boots are always at the ready, they are really too cute to hide in the closet.

How to Make the Holiday Wreath

Supplies Needed:

*Lots of Unbreakable Ornaments in different sizes.

*Wire

*Wire Cutters

*Cone {optional}

Start by taking your ornaments out of the packages. I placed mine in a large bowl, and mixed them up so I could just choose them in a random fashion.

1.  Cut the right size wire.  Just bend it around until you have the size you want, and add two or three inches at the end “extra”.

2.  Make a loop at the end on one side, use pliers if your wire is really heavy duty.

3. Start “threading” your ornaments onto the wire and slide them all the way down to the loop.  I just did them rather randomly, but did try to pay a little attention to color, so that I wasn’t adding five green ornaments at one time, for instance.

4. As you add more ornaments, you will be able to push them together slightly to form a circular band.  Keep adding until you are all out of space.

5. When you reach the end of the wire, simply bend that piece of wire through the loop on the other end, and close off, using pliers.

Done!  You can add ribbons, or a cone like I did.  For the cone, I punched two holes in the back, and threaded a length of florist’s wire so I could wire it to wreath, or the gate.  I filled the bottom of the cone with crumpled paper, and cut some greens from the garden to put in.

I threaded some more ornaments onto wire, and created “picks” by wrapping that wire onto a bamboo skewer, then inserted the skewers into the cone.  How easy is that? I hope you will try this.  {not just for the holidays, but this would be stunning for a baby shower or birthday party too, just use different colors.}

You can add ribbons, or use the cone like I did. Since this is for my iron gate, I just wired the cone onto the gate and inserted the tip in between the ornaments on the bottom.

I’ll be back later in the week deck the rest of FrenchGardenHouse, and hopefully show you our new kitchen if everything goes right.  Happy Decorating!!

{in the meantime, here is a peek at holidays past at FrenchGardenHouse}
If you want to romance your Home and Garden with antique and vintage treasures to make you smile each time you come home, visit our shop FrenchGardenHouse.