Dried Flower Wreath Tutorial
If you love the season – but don’t love the garish costumes, pumpkin pie and screaming children that tend to accompany it – then our dried flower wreaths are for you. Plus, it’s not October specific – we have ours on show all year round!
To make our dried flower wreath you will need:
- Secateurs or sharp scissors
- Jute string or florists wire
- A rattan wreath base (ours are 16 inch rattan bases from Hobbycraft)
- A selection of dried flowers
The method:
Making a wreath is much more simple than it looks. We use pre-made wreath bases to speed up the process but you can make your own from willow, birch or hazel branches twisted together and held with florist’s wire.
Choose a selection of dried flowers, often just 3 or 4 different types of flower and foliage look better than lots and lots. Always leave 2 – 3 inches of stem on the flowers and simply push them into the wreath, one type at a time, working your way round the wreath.
We find it is best to start off with foliage and larger flowers first and leave smaller flowers until the end.
Dried fruit can be really effective or even nuts and berries but beware the birds may help themselves if you hang the wreath outside!
Don’t feel you have to cover every inch of the Wreath with flowers, you need a surprising amount of flowers to do this and often just a few flowers can look just as effective. If you feel the flowers are not secure on the wreath you can tie them in using string or peg them with florists wire. One of the benefits of dried flower wreaths is that they will last many months inside or out!
Some of the dried flowers we use are:
- Craspedia globose
- Lagurus ovatus
- Salvia horminum
- Hordium jubatum
- Cornflower
- Larkspur
- Eryngium giganteum
- Nigella seed pods
- Daucus carota
- Ammi majus
- Cardoon and globe artichoke
- Orlaya grandiflora
- Teasel (don’t go near these with a fluffy jumper!)
To dry our cut flowers we try to cut them just before the flowers are fully open, they are much more likely to retain their colour and petals this way.
Cut them with the stems as long as possible to make them easier to hang.
Hang the flowers upside down in small bunches (only 6-8 stems) in a cool dry place with good airflow and out of direct sunlight. Bright light bleaches the colour out. We don’t recommend using a greenhouse, the flowers seem to be more prone to rotting in that environment. We string them up in the rafters of our greenhouse.
It often takes 2-4 weeks for flowers to fully dry out. It’s well worth experimenting with different species to see what works best.
We would LOVE to see how you get on so please tag us on our Facebook or Instagram page.
