How To Make a Beautiful Dried Hydrangea Wreath
by Rachel Ray
You can either purchase already dried hydrangea flowers from your local craft store, or you can dry your own. The biggest trick when drying your own is the timing of when you pick the flowers. It is best to pick them right before you anticipate your first fall frost. If you pick them mid-summer, they just will not dry correctly. Dried hydrangea wreaths are so beautiful and versatile in a home, and a lot of fun to make as well.
To harvest and dry your hydrangeas, cut them and strip all leaves off of the stems. Either hang them upside down in a darkened room to dry or simply put in a vase to dry, but again a darkened room works best to preserve the color. Try picking blooms off different plants if possible to have a variety of colors to work with.
For a wreath base pick any type you want, I like either grapevine types or Styrofoam, depending on the look I’m after. Take floral wire and wrap it around the wreath and form a small loop in order to hang it when finished.
If using Styrofoam based wreath, use a low melt point glue gun. Take each larger bunch of hydrangea and break up into smaller florets. Add a drop of glue to each floret and poke into the wreath base. Move from top to bottom, left to right, and inside and outside of the wreath base until it’s completely filled in.
What you are looking for here is balance. In shape you don’t want any sticking out way beyond the others. You don’t want one side fuller than the other, you are also looking the balance of color. Step back and look from a distance and think of overall shape as you’re looking.
The second area to look for is balance of color. This is the purpose of doing each bloom all over, then filling in, so you achieve that balance of color. Give another once over to check on that.
Now that your wreath is complete, you may want to leave it with this plain, simple look. You also may want to add baby’s breath or other dried florals to it, or a bow. Experiment with the type of look you like.
For a grapevine base, the concept is the same as above. If you want to add bows or ribbons, glue them first to the base then glue to hydrangea flowers on it around them. Sometimes bare spaces looks nice to allow sight of the grapevines. Experiment on the design you like.
Try to avoid sunlight in the place you hang your wreath as it will drastically reduce it’s life. You can redo the wreath each year by simply stripping off last year’s blooms and replacing with the current year’s, for a fresh wreath each year.
Sometimes people are disappointed in dried flowers because they expect them to look great for many years. Really that’s a myth because they really will only last about a year looking nice.
