Autumn is a lovely time of year in Scotland - it is still nice enough weather to get out and about, but with the nights drawing in you want to cosy-up indoors and start being creative. Making an autumn wreath is a way to enjoy both of these things, because you can forage all sorts of lovely items from the garden or park and then combine them all together to make an autumn wreath.

Making an autumn wreath

I have been foraging lovely materials from the woods at the back of the house for the last few weeks. Some of these are to eat (raspberries, blackberries and rowan berries) and others are to make into drinks (rosehips, sloes and elderberries), but there are so many things that just look beautiful that I have collected. I have been cutting some beautiful grasses and seedheads, picking up some of the many different fir cones and even finding some feathers on the ground.

The colours are predominantly brown, so to brighten up the wreath I used some autumn coloured skeleton leaves.

You will need

• a wreath base - I bought a rattan base online
• a selection of foraged grasses, seedheads, pine cones, feathers, leaves
• a pack of autumn colours skeleton leaves
• narrow florists wire
• scissors
• pva glue
• twine
• ribbon (optional)

Designing the wreath

Next you need to lay the materials on top of the wreath base and just move them around until you are happy with how it looks. I was lucky that I had two wreath bases because putting both the feathers and the grasses on the same wreath looked too much. As you can see from the photos, I loved the lupin seedheads and how they wrapped around the wreath.

Once you are happy with your layout start attaching the materials to the base.

1. Check that the wreath base has a hanger and if not add either a wire or twine hanger.
2. I used the skeleton leaves as background colour to lift the design and to make the fir cones and grasses stand out. The skeleton leaves are sturdy enough for you to be able to secure them together with narrow wire and then thread the wire through the base. I then added a dab of pva glue just to keep them in place.
3. Use the twine to tie together the stems for the grasses and stemmed seedheads such as meadowsweet. secure them onto the base using the twine. If they are long you may also wish to tie them in place with some wire. I also secured the lupin heads with wire - it was a bit tricky to thread the wire through the wreat base, so I attached the wire to a safety pin to help me push it through the twigs.
4. The feathers didn't really need any securing, I could just push them into the wreath and they stayed in place.
5. Finally I used the fine wire to tie the fir cones together. Some of them had stalks which made it easy to secure them, but some of them I had to wrap the wire round the cones into where they have opened up. They were then tied into the wreath.

If you want to add a ribbon add it at the end and then hang up your wreath and admire.

I have made two designs, one using a variety of skeleton leaves for a lot of colour. The other using skeleton leaves to add spot colour