Scandinavian Christmas Arrangements | A Beautiful Traditional Clay Technique

Welcome back. I am going to make you a couple of little cute centerpieces for the maybe dining room table or coffee table. And I'm going to make it in clay, which is something that's not really used in North America, but in Denmark and Scandinavia. And I don't honestly know if the rest of Europe use it a lot, but we use it all the time for Christmas. And it's a very sustainable way uh product and for that reason i decided to introduce it to to our this side of the atlantic i really haven't seen any information anywhere online on how if it's ever used here i've never seen it but i'll show you and it's really fun to work with and it's really fun for kids to work with too and it's not the it's a little messy but compared to the foam that break and you can't really take things out and do it again with clay you could totally do that one thing that you have to think about when you use clay is that it's the pot if you want to recycle the pot for next year or something else you have to be careful you don't squeeze this clay all into a pot like this because this one here has a curve so you won't be able to take it out but the best thing is actually to use a pot that doesn't have a curve like this but they're straight up then you don't have this issue but of course I had this one here and I really want to use it. The clay we buy here I had to go to a like a craft store and they come in packages like this little packages like this and buy it in dollar stores because I if you go into craft stores or something this is almost 15 18 dollars and this should only be a couple of dollars i have about two packs in this ball here and i had it it comes in a clay color and it comes in gray it's just the gray is starting to look clayish because i handle it it doesn't matter which one you use when you have to put two or three packs together for something what i do is i do it in my garage and then literally sort of put them together and hit it on the floor because you really want to make sure that where the seam is that that is sealed right you can also squeeze it or something because otherwise that could crack but like you just sort of really work it really well and then in this case here because of this curve like i talked about i'm going to use a little bit of bubble wrap where did it go i cut piece. I just cut a piece of bubble wrap like this, fold it a couple of times and put it lower here. Kind of in where that curb is in the pot. And then I know when I put this in, it should roughly be the same height. Good. I use gloves when I do it because it is a little messy but you can just wash your hands it's fine. So my plan is to put candles in here. This is gonna be very simple. Something that anybody can approach and do actually what i try to do when i handle these candles especially after we work with all this greens is that the candles get dirty you don't want to have to feel you have to wash your candles when you're done so when we handle them here put a piece of paper towel around them and then i'm going to show you how we actually attach the candles so they don't fall off and i do it with a wooden stick and a couple of thick wires and you just have to heat up the wires and press but press gently you press too hard that crack it'll crack the candle so very important that you sort of just let it burn into the candle not because you're pressing the stick into that wire into the candle so i usually put two wires and then one wooden stick in you can do that whichever way press it if you need to you just pull it out if you feel that it didn't go in fast enough and then heat it up again. But I'm going to show you how I do the last one here where I want to put the wood stick in because I do it a little bit different. Press it in and then I just spin it a little bit to make the hole bigger. It might get a little bit of wax out and I usually do that a couple of times because the wooden stick is thicker than this wire. and then and again do not press too hard because you can you literally break the candle there we go and with the clay you don't have to make these here too too long when i do it in in floral foam i make them absolutely as long as possible but the clay is really strong when you work with the clay it will dry sort of after a day or so it'll start getting harder on the outside but it takes a while before it's actually all dry in the middle but that that's of course we're just using evergreens and things that dries all naturally and i had i made arrangements i had to test it this so long ago since i worked with it i thought i had better try it before i show you how to do it and i made it and it lasted over two weeks absolutely perfect and then i threw it out but i was very impressed with how nicely it lasted i would say what lasts the best in the ever in the clay is the the noble fir and cedar and boxwood is amazing anything that naturally that we know always dries really well like these juniper and things they tend to sometimes lose their needles the trick is to just not touch it and then then you're fine okay so i this here i'll show you what i have that I thought I would use. I have these eucalyptus pods, a little bit of noble fir. I have some other Brasilia berries, and then the juniper and boxwood. That was my thought for this year. And then some little cones and maybe some anise. We'll see. Sometimes, you know, you have a plan, and that plan changes a lot of times. But that was the thought. i always start up with a little bit of moss right around the candle because we can never get in right around into the candle with the greens we don't want to be in there with the greens anyway but just a little spring of moss here this here you don't want to put it on top of the clay because it could be really annoying to poke into but it's very hard to put in at the end so that's why i put it in now i could put in sorry a couple of little hooks and keep it at this place because it wants to move down over the clay and trust me it's very annoying to poke in. I also have a couple of these little hens and chickens succulents that I thought would be nice to put in. I'm gonna put these here on a cube so they're a little bit higher for me. Okay I cut a couple of these little here so literally start up at the bottom and sort of have it come straight out not up not up around the candle not up here not yet we'll see later on we could do that. The nice thing with the clay is that it's really strong like compared to the oasis like the floral foam this here is really good it is um you of course deep make some good inserts so that it stays but it doesn't when first they start to harden then it won't come apart if you do the clay part ahead of time you can just put it in a bag or put saran wrap on because otherwise they'll dry up and then it's going to be too hard for you to poke into in denmark we use these here i remember doing this here when i was a kid and we would actually i grew up in this industry so i've been doing this here for forever and ever but we would make these here on wood pieces and we would use the clay and the clay is amazing for doing that on a on a root or something I'm actually I'm doing a couple in my course my Christmas course and you can see how I do it so you can see I did like a kind of like a group of three like one two three and I'll keep doing that with my greens which can make it a little more interesting instead of just putting it all over the place so now I'll do my greening first and then and then i'll put the the cones and things you always take take the little bottom greens off and then it's much easier to insert when you don't have all that green at the bottom but of course if you don't have the clay and you don't have it available where you are you could use the the floral foam and do the same thing when you have time it's actually really nice to do these things when you work in a shop we all know we start off all ambitious at the beginning of of november and how excited about getting into this christmas season and doing all these arrangements and then sort of halfway through by early december we're running out of steam because it is a very very busy time and we don't always have time to to make these little things but if you do this here ahead of time or if you do it at home it is actually really satisfying to do okay i think i have enough of the blue base of the we'll use a little bit of boxwood this is a amazing green to use it is so strong and so long lasting and it really stays just like this shrivel a little bit in size that's the only thing that gets a little bit smaller it's almost coming out too far don't want anything come out a little tighter that i think is sort of what is these little guys here what's special about them is that it's not this big poofy arrangement and there's actually very little product in these here it's the time that it takes more than anything so i want to cover almost all the clay so you don't see it at all and now now we have covered and i just want to add a little bit of green so we have a little bit of a of different dimensions like something coming out a tiny little bit more and because i think this is the nicest green in these here i want to emphasize that a little bit put one more here as a golden rule you should always put your favorite greens in at the end because then the other ones will be more in the bottom okay i think i should put them down again now so you can see better there we go okay we will put in i have these little these little uh succulents and they are really they're great for centerpieces and i you you can buy them as a plant we can buy them cut here too but buy them as a plant and it has to be this variety ideally like the one that's really meaty like that looks like a little rose almost they last a long long time out out of water that's why they can grow in your garden where there's very very little water you might know that yeah you have them in your garden so i literally just take a wire and then poke it through the stem this and then hold on carefully bend it and then you can poke it in and i have three here so i think two in this one this one different height and then i wired some of these cones off you could also with this green here you could actually glue them in it's just sometimes you see the glue and it's not always the nicest so i am going to take two right there they're cute little guys i almost make those too short don't make them too short through here go over there and do that on the other side let me show you how i wire these i use this one so i take it in into the middle and halfway in so it goes like well like this at the bottom and then twist it the cone leave that and then we'll put some of these little seed pods in and i used this here because you can sort of see how how nice they work with the pot right that's the thing the pot is not just it should really work with the rest it's not just a container to hold the clay right so they have a little stem and i don't need to wire these here again i'm trying to not touch my candle too much because my hands are definitely not clean this one here i need to wire and again i just do a little loop i should use a thicker one so you can see it this is really put us through here and then put it on each side of the stem and then take one of them and twist it around the stem and the other wire and then you have it there there's uh it's endless what you can use in these arrangements of different pods and seeds so use whatever you feel like but really think little bit about the colors and and how it all goes together i think that's the important thing colors the pot and proportion proportion is also a big thing that it looks proportionate i think this is really cute if i have a couple of little spots where i see the clay it could be around the candle it's not bad at all um then i could fill it with a little bit of moss do not start putting too much green in because you don't want it to become messy right so we could absolutely stop here and say that done but I'm going to show you a couple more things just because why not and we could put some branches in we could loosen it up a little bit and just put a little branch in and before I do that I also want to show you actually I decided not to use these here because I think it's just too much there's enough texture in there and too much is not always the right thing it's like when you do a painting when you paint the painting it's knowing when to stop and also sort of still at same time have enough product in. But I like to use these little anise. They're very very pretty little things and they smell amazing and especially around Christmas time. So I have a wire somewhere right there. There's this colored wire here and I can string them literally twist to a couple of twists. Don't do them too close. You can always come back with the wire. I want to start somewhere where I can tie it on one of these little pods they can sort of dance around it a little bit in here would come out it's fun to put in come out a little bit if you pick the wire will allow that it's cute when they come out and they hang out just adds a little more fun to it the smell so nice that i made another one here the other one so when you do this here just try different things whatever you like either you at home or whatever your customers like that's what you do and that's what you buy right but always try different things and figure out what you like to work with see how nice they are when they come out and dance a little bit on the outside there so that was one option you definitely can do and then i'm just going to show you how you can also put a branch in if you just want to loosen it up a little bit i think this is a yellow dogwood and you need very very little it gives that negative space right i think that's about what i mean so you can maybe see it that up against the wall now how you see the branches and how that does add a little bit of interest to it but this is really something you could put glass baubles into you can make it glitzy if you felt like this is i would say a very typical scandinavian look with all the organic things in here and you don't feel so bad about throwing the whole thing out here after and get really good candles i just looked at the bottom these candles here they had like about 62 hours of burning i get candles so you really can use it where you have it and also if you sell it it's a very good thing for people to know so they don't just don't use their candles i i find i've been in people's homes at christmas time and the centerpiece is still there and they they burned this much of it because they were just so afraid of burning this candle like use it and that's the whole idea that's why we have candles so have fun with this