The Christmas Wreath

Welcome to the new Cabin & Cottage blog! If you're new here, Welcome! If you're already a follower, Welcome to you too! My old beloved blog still stands, and I am still posting there, but the old blog is being flagged by Google due to link spam. This doesn't really affect anyone who stops by, as I understand it, but it is generating a spam warning by Linky as well as other spam blockers. While undergoing the long process of clearing out the malware causing the problems I am also blogging and linking to parties from here since the links are unaffected at this address. 

Now onto new business!

My granddaughter made this tissue wreath a few years ago. It's already starting to get an aged look. It doesn't take that long for white tissue to start yellowing, and that's a good thing!

A hundred years ago in the old days when I was a new bride and there wasn't much money around for Christmas (kinda like these days) I made one of these. I had it for over twenty-five years, and I must tell you the thing looked just ancient. Every year I would pull it out of the box, fluff it up and maybe dress it up a little. A new ribbon, or a few tiny colored balls. . . .

A tissue wreath is the cheapest and easiest thing in the world to make. A little labor intensive and tedious, perhaps. That's probably why more than one person ends up working on it. (I actually finished this one for my granddaughter.) But in that case you have more than just a wreath . . . . You have a shared memory.

I've told this story here before, but one day a woman came into the shop where this wreath was hanging and wanted to learn how to make one. (I thought everybody on the planet knew how.) So I showed her the simple procedure.

Take a wire hanger. Shape it into a circle. Place two rectangle pieces of tissue paper across the wire on opposite sides and twist them together, and repeat a hundred thousand times . . . You press the twists against each other to the side as you go. . . . Make sure a good movie is on!

Add whatever when you're done.

How many times have you already heard the word simple used so far this season? Turns out quite a few more folks these days want to learn how to do it too!

I tend to do different decorations every year. (A lot of us compulsive decorators do that.) But I don't have much storage space, and I like to keep things easy, so I mostly dress up what's already here. I also use a lot of natural stuff like greens and pine cones and twigs, which I love the best anyway.

One Christmas when I was having a bit of a downer (bad things can happen at his time of year too, of course), and my heart just wasn't much into decorating, I tossed out that twenty-five year old tissue wreath that I had made. I thought it was just too dusty, and that it had become just too shabby. It was even cathartic to sweep away that old worthless thing that nobody except me cared anything about.

But it's funny how now I still look for that ratty old thing in the Christmas box every year. It's like there were a hundred thousand little twists and turns of life also wound up and pushed to the side of it while I was busy watching something else. There was more than just a few scraps of fragile tissue paper wrapped onto that old wire hanger after all. . . .

 

Of course we're all busy making memories this time of year whether we are trying to or not!

But I'm so glad you took a moment to stop by!

(Or find me again . . . sniff, sniff.)

Jacqueline

Join me at

Timewashed~Blissful White Wednesday

Savvy Southern Style~WOW Us Wed

Common Ground~Vintage Inspiration

French Country Cottage~Feathered Nest