6 minute read
Craft
Sarah is the author of craftinvaders.co.uk where she blogs about her original craft tutorials, recipes, foraging, and developing wellbeing through being creative, spending By Sarah Whiting time outdoors and connecting with nature
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Easter Wreath
OUR DIY EASTER WREATH IS DECORATED WITH SPECKLED QUAIL EGGS, LICHEN AND FLOWER SPRIGS FOR THE PERFECT SPRING DOOR DÉCOR. UTILIZING A WILLOW BASE, THIS SPRING WREATH ONLY TAKES A FEW MINUTES TO ASSEMBLE AND LOOKS BEAUTIFUL, PERFECT FOR YOUR DOOR!
Materials
- Blown quail eggs - Twigs - Lichen or oak moss (dried out) - Faux flower sprigs (I use a combination of natural and faux materials), in this session I used forsythia sprigs - Wreath base (visit my website if you’ve missed how to make one in a previous article), or buy one in your local craft supply store. If you use styrofoam, I’d suggest painting it or covering it in fabric before you start to decorate it. - Glue gun and sticks
Steps 1. Start by threading the lengths of the faux forsythia sprigs into the willow ring. These stay in place without needing to be glued. 2. Now you can start sticking the natural elements onto the wreath base. I find it easiest to add one component at a time when decorating a rustic wreath, so I started with the twigs. 3. Now secure the lichen pieces. 4. And finally, the quail eggs. Now all you have to do is choose where to hang it (or who to gift it to!). The stars of the show are the quail eggs. I used real blown eggs on my wreath (here are some easy instructions on how to blow an egg), but you could easily use a faux alternative if you wish.
Happy Crafting!
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Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars
Irealise it’s coming up on thirty years since I was first seduced. We never forget our first time. I’d heard one or two things about her but, looking back, I was an innocent, literally fresh off the boat. She’d been routinely described as ‘fascinating’ and, of course, ‘beautiful’, but I was ready to shrug off her advances, immune at the time to such distractions. Nevertheless, despite my determined indifference, I soon succumbed: another notch on the bedpost for La Belle France. I’d never set foot in this country before that spring of 1991. Angie and I were a new couple back then, on our first holiday together, a Eurocamp week in Normandy. Not much money between us, she paid for the trip, we used my car. Everything was memorable: thatched roofs topped with irises; the D-Day beaches; a sunny lunch in Honfleur, the Tapestry, of course. Quiet roads. Above all, it was the French people with their extraordinary (to us) old-world courtesies: Angie stopping to smell roses tumbling over a garden fence, the owner calling from the balcony urging her to take one; a café owner amiably correcting my linguistic error with a warm “well done for trying” handshake. I recall especially a late May evening in Rouen, darkness enveloping the old square. Under a gazillion stars, the discreet floodlighting draped everything in antique gold. Restaurants were humming, waiters weaving between chattering diners, corks popping. Gypsy jazz playing from a high window somewhere. Life had been choppy so the calm now was surreal. I exhaled for the first time in four years. At one point, a great cheer went up from the tables as into the square burst a long conga-line of roller-skaters. There must have been a hundred of them, a Saturday night ritual, we were told. Around us they sped, waving in acknowledgement of the laughing applause, heads turning everywhere. Parents with strapped-on babies, seniors and teens, bright colours flying. Two laps of the square and they were gone, snaking off down a narrow side street. Cheers subsided, restaurant chatting resumed, corks popped again. Unreality restored. I think I knew then that this was no sugarrush of holiday euphoria, no transient high from being ‘away from it all’. In fact, the notion that one day we might come to live in France was born that very first week, 24 years before we were able to do it. Many more holidays followed. With our collective children we once drove from North Wales to Marseille, just for the half term break. For that first visit in 1991, we crossed the Channel by boat in around four hours, grinning at each other as we berthed in the Dieppe sunshine. Subsequent trips saw us skimming over its surface, (how we miss the hovercraft), hurtling along beneath it or invisible in the clouds overhead. From Nancy to Nantes, Caen to Carcassonne, we wandered and explored, utterly enamoured, while still prepared for disillusion. It never came. However, revisiting places linked to treasured memories in the hope of recreating what went before risks irreversible disappointment. The ancient Greeks knew this: ‘nostos’ (to return); ‘algos’ (pain); thus, nostalgia – literally the pain of returning. We did indulge in one notable exception to our rule, not to recreate but to build anew every time. For several years, we returned each February on Angie’s birthday, to Honfleur, to the very spot where we ate our first French lunch back in 1991. Every time, the lady owner would greet us with tears and open arms, amazed that anyone would drive 800km from the UK in winter weather. Angie’s gift to her, a splendid painting of the restaurant, hangs there still, above ‘our’ table. Memory is a box in the heart marked ‘The Past’. Some items we leave in there because, denied the light, they eventually fade to grey. The best ones we take out to watch them gleam, thirty years on, like bright summer sunshine and golden evenings under the stars.
