(Editor’s note:) Last year Erick and Emily of Heidi’s Bridge created this pretty shamrock crown for the blog, and to celebrate green day we thought it would be fun to bring it back for those wanting to celebrate in style:
When we first think of St. Patrick’s day, a wave of fluorescent green shamrocks and rainbow chotskies first come to mind. If you’re Irish (or just pretending for the holiday), one is faced with the challenge of being festive without wearing a tacky green getup. We devised this shamrock floral crown with the classy Irish lass in mind–because if you’re crammed into a dive bar with sticky floors, you might as well do it in style.
Materials
A few stems of white wax flower
A bunch of baby’s breath
Two small pots of shamrocks aka clover (they usually carry these plants in garden supply stores or grocery stores around the holiday)
Green floral wire
Scissors
Directions
1.) The first thing you want to do is to make a ring the size of your head out of the woody wax flower stem. This hardy flower will form the base of the crown that we add the baby’s breath and the shamrocks to. To make the ring, you will need to affix two stems of the wax flower together with your floral wire, taking care to avoid wiring over the delicate flowers on the stem as your wrap them together.
2.) Now that you have an elongated wax flower stem, it’s time to form your ring. Gently bend the wax flower stem clockwise into a ring. Measure on your head to see how large you need the ring to be and pinch with your fingers when adjusted to size. Then, wire the ends closed so that you have a strong ring base.
3.) Once you have a ring for your crown, you need to start making “mini bouquets” of baby’s breath and shamrocks. To do this, pinch together sprays of baby’s breath and shamrock between your thumb and forefinger. Then, wrap the floral wire around the stems to make a “mini bouquet”. Before you snip the wire, leaving about and inch and a half tail of the wire (this will be how you attach the bouquet to the crown.)
4.) Time to start adding the “mini bouquets” of baby’s breath to the crown. Starting from the left and working right, use the wire “tail” that you left on to affix the mini bouquets to the crown. As you add the mini bouquets to the crown, make sure you are hiding the floral wire with flowers. Keep adding until you have desired look of your crown–we opted to only add flowers to the front of the crown so it wasn’t overwhelming, but you can add flowers around the whole ring if you like.
5.) Snip any of the baby’s breath stems that are poking out and any other stray flowers.
