WREATH ROUNDUP

Well, it's that time of the year again. Yep, the holidays, Christmas and the New Year. All the preparation and planning. And, for our family, this includes making wreaths. For a few years now we've made them to give as gifts. I may be slightly prejudiced, but our wreaths are extraordinarily nice. We use a variety of native greens: double balsam is the mainstay with accent pieces of cedar, spruce, princess pine, and white pine. They are decorated with a burgundy or red velour bow, a few pine cones with their tips painted white, and clusters of red berries. Not too cluttered or gawdy. I would post a picture of one, but I don't have the ability (know-how & technology) to do that yet...maybe next year.

Which brings me to the next part of this post: Our gift wreaths have been well received and appreciated by friends and family; so well, that people have encouraged us to make them for sale. That hasn't been feasible until now. Our wreaths are made with a steel clamp-ring form. This requires using a clamp machine and in the past I've borrowed one from a friend. But I've had to wait until she was done making her wreaths and this often wasn't until right before Christmas...too late for me to make them for sale.

This year we invested in our own clamp machine, a case of 100 clamp-ring forms, a case of ribbon, six spools of florist wire, and a case each of red berries and white berries. To the tune of about $400 (gulp!). As with any business, there's always an initial start-up cost. We weren't able to make this investment until this month, which is really too late for any great sales promotion for this holiday season, but we are planning to launch it as a family business next year.

Making wreaths is a lot of work; starting with going out to harvest all the different evergreen boughs (which requires the purchase of a permit). Then clipping the the boughs to size, bundling four or five pieces of balsam with an accent piece, such as princess pine or cedar, placing it in the form and closing the clamps with the machine. Repeat that process thirteen more times for each wreath and trim any stray pieces to give a uniform appearance. Then comes decorating; the worst part is making the bow. I hate making bows! To get a nice bow, I use about nine feet of 2 5/8 inch wide ribbon and loop, twist, tie, and pray through gritted teeth. Sometimes they turn out...sometimes I start over. After I attach the ribbon to the wreath with florist wire, I wire on pine cones and berries. Voila! Takes about an hour from start to finish for one wreath, not counting cutting and clipping boughs and making the dreaded bow.

Ideally, one should harvest the boughs and other greens before we have much snow (it's ALOT of work digging princess pine out from under the snow...like Mark and I did this year), but if you get the boughs too early they dry out, turn brown, and needles fall like rain. So you have to watch the forecast to beat the weather, be in production by early to mid-November to have wreaths ready by deer season and Thanksgiving.

All of this takes place simultaneously with everything else that goes on in our family's life: homeschooling, work, church activities, chores, hunting, and holiday preparations...with a little sleep interspersed here and there! Thankfully, we have four kids who are willing to help make this possible and it didn't hurt to give them a little incentive...any money made from the sale of wreaths will go toward a family vacation.

We'll need one.