This year, for the first time in my life, I have a fake Christmas tree. Dan and I will be traveling for the holidays and it didn’t make sense to have a live tree in the house just to get rid of it long before Christmas or come home to a dead tree.

Because of that, I had been yearning for a real wreath for my front door. Linda came across a wreath-making workshop at Intersect Brewing. Proceed from the event benefit FoCo Cafe, a nonprofit pay-what-you-can restaurant.

Surprise surprise, I had very little idea how a wreath was made. It’s quite labor intensive! We began with forming two sizes of bundles, like those below.

The bundles are then woven into the wreath frame and secured with wire.

After two upright bundles are added (as below), a third bundle would be added at a 90-degree angle to cover the stems and add fullness to the wreath.

Linda and I were some of the first wreath-makers to finish; we spent a bit over two hours at work, including just a few minutes adding simple decorations.

My wreath is now proudly festooning our door. I opted for a loose and shaggy look; it reminds me of my hair at peak wildness.

P.S. Wreath-making is not all I got up to this weekend. Dan and I headed down to Denver where I spent six hours in a writing workshop guided by David Rothman.

The workshop focused on poetic meter (a favorite topic of mine), and resulted in a lot of fascinating whiteboards that looked like this:

Trust me, it was worth the drive. 🙂