This is our first year living in our house during the Christmas season. We moved in JUST before Christmas last year but we were not really settled in our new space yet throughout the holidays. This year, with more time on my hands, I decided to have fun with our front porch and approach it how I would a floral installation like those I make for weddings.

This is last year’s porch – a local garden centre was selling small ‘tree tops’ so I made a little forest on the front porch along with a delicate evergreen garland. A perfect simple and inexpensive option!

The week leading up to making this year’s installation I scoured my 3 siblings properties and my parents’ property to forage all the fresh materials that I needed. I found a combination of spruce, pine, and cedar boughs as well as rose hips, dried wild asters, and sumac. I also used hydrangea that I had dried from our wedding in September and dried out some oranges too. The final accent was some twinkly lights – it’s amazing how much a magic a little bit of light can add!

With such a large piece around the door I chose to keep the rest of the porch simple but did later add wreaths to the front windows after these images were taken (not on the door though). This will last throughout the entire winter season in our cold climate.

I documented the whole process on my Instagram stories under the highlight called ‘Porch’. However, for those of you curious about the mechanics of this – the image below shows you the ‘bones’ of this piece. Using chicken wire is a common technique when making floral installations. I created a chicken wire tube to go around the perimeter of the door. Since our house is made out of brick, I did not want to drill into the brick so I had to attach it from the wood at the top. I screwed 3 eye hooks into the porch ceiling and attached the chicken wire tube to them using zip ties. To secure the sides, I tied a heavy brick to the bottom of the chickenwire – it has worked great! Unfortunately this was a realization I had after taking this photo but again, check out my Instagram highlight to see a better look at that!