Brussels sprout Christmas wreath

Brussels sprouts Christmas wreath: transcript

You can't beat a Christmas door wreath for brightening up the festive scene. But how about creating one with a contemporary twist? Well, that's exactly what I'm going to do here. I'm going to use a traditional wicker ring. You can get these in most craft shops or florists. We have a good old Brussels sprout, there's florists wire here, some leaves - now, these could be any evergreens that you have in the garden, perhaps something from the bay tree; mini bell peppers, red shallots, and then some physalis. Finally, I've got a big hunk of pink raffia.

The first thing I'm going to do is attach the raffia to the willow ring. So I take quite a few strands like I've got here and just thread them through like this and then just tie them in a very loose knot. Now we're going to move on to actually attaching the ingredients that I've got around the ring to the thing itself.

I'm going to start with the sprouts. Now, sprouts are actually quite hard little things and to be able to pass the wire through them properly, to attach them to the willow, I need to skewer them first. So, this is a barbecue skewer, but you could use anything that you've got lurking around the kitchen. I'm just going to very carefully push it through the centre of the sprout. Now, that's created a hole - through it goes. Now, if you just push the wire through, take it around to the back of the sprout. Now, these two pieces of wire are what you're going to use to actually attach it to the ring. So literally, poke it through, put the pieces of wire together and just hide any excess wire within the willow - and there we are. Now, there's quite a few to attach here, and I'm not quite sure how many it's going to take to fill the entire ring, but I'm going to get cracking.

So, I've started quite a few of the sprouts on the ring. And I think I might add a few of the other elements in now. I think next, I will go for one of these little bell peppers. The skin is soft enough as it is, so I'm just going to put the florist's wire straight through. I'm going to put it through the end of the fruit rather than the end where the stem is, because I actually want the stem to show. Same again - lets just twizzle the wire around - and I think I'm going to put this just near the top here. It makes a great contrast to the pink raffia. I'm also going to start now adding the shallots. So these are, as you can imagine, tough like the sprouts. So these do need to be skewered. So, once again, take real care when you're doing this, but just push the skewer through - give it a twist to make a large hole and then add the wire through. Next, it's time for the physalis. Now, these are very delicate, so they definitely don't need a skewer. Just go straight through the stem. Taking care not to damage the delicate leaves. Exactly the same process, straight on to the ring, as you have done with the sprouts and the shallots.

So, I've just about filled the willow ring with all the ingredients that I've got. There's still a bit of tidying up to do, but fundamentally, we're nearly there. The last thing I'm going to do before I create the bow and finish it off, is add some of these leaves that we've got here. This is a bit of a simple process - I'm just going to poke them in at the back.

So the wreath is virtually complete. If I just hold it up, you can see how the leaves look from the front - they're all going in the same direction, in a nice circular motion. All that's left to do now is tie the raffia into a bow, just to finish the whole thing off. So, I'm going to turn the wreath around so I can see what I'm doing and just split the raffia in two and create a nice chunky bow. And there we have it - our wreath is just about finished and ready to hang up.