How to make a simple christmas wreath on a shoestring

Hi Everyone,
I noticed some amazing Christmas wreaths on sale in flower shops and in design shops round the City center back in mid-December.
Although I had never made a Christmas wreath before in my life, I decided to give it a go.

I noticed that those shops used beautiful dark willow branches to make their own Christmas wreaths.

Unfortunately the price of willow branches was minimum 4 euro added to the price of buying a wire and bows and other little decorations, the cost of my wreath was going to be about the same as the ones in the shops so I thought to give it a miss.

Coming home one evening I noticed fallen branches on the pavement (blown away with the wind we have had lately) and those branches seem to be very flexible, nice and bare enough to make a wreath. "Hurrah!" I thought, " here's my wreath!"

So I collected them.

I wanted to add pine cones to my wreath too and found some as well on the ground near I live.

Surprisingly enough, I had a red wire and had bought previously Christmas ribbons ( see previous post: http://laspeedwing.blogspot.ie/2013/12/how-to-make-pretty-christmas-tree-out.html )

I found red bows and silver bells in a pound shop and so all I had to do now was to start putting all this together.

So this is my project recipe:
- red wire
- mini pine cones ( attached to broken branches if possible)
- dead branches
- scissors
- 5 red bows
- 3 silver bells

First I divided the branches into 2 bunches of branches and attached them with a red wire.

For the next part, I needed an extra pair of hands to hold the 2 bunches of branches together and used my red wire on each side again. That's 4 ties around the branches.

The branches still look all over the place so I added an extra 4 wired ties around my wreath (that's 8 ties now) I then stuck the pine cones branches in each tie and this is how it looked like then:

The last part was easy. I trimmed the excess of branches, tied my red bows and bells on the branches and sewed 3 ribbons around my new wreath. ( but you can add more ribbons and make them twirl around your wreath)  and this is the final result:

I suppose it isn't bad for my first attempt.
In fact just between you and me, I was quite proud of myself to offer this as a Christmas gift to a friend of mine. Eco friendly enough and limiting in my own little way the frantic consumerism at Christmas ;-)