Any repeat reader may have noticed a foraging trend throughout our blogs. That’s because B2W hired a womble to write blogs and they won’t stop going on about it, so this next section will be around decorations you can collect around Wimbledon common.
At the time of writing – undecorated pinecones come in at £8.89 Per Kilogram on Amazon. Quite a hefty price tag for something you can find all over the floor. You can literally find these for free, all over the floor. Once you have collected some of these floor pinecones, the next step is to dry them out. This means leaving them in the oven for about 30 minutes at 200 C – more detailed instructions can be found with a quick google search. Then you are left with some nice dry pinecones, ready for decorating. Imagination is really the limit with what you can make here. If you want something to hang from a tree these could be a nice stand in for baubles, add some beads and some festive colours and they’ll not even look out of place.
Sticking with a theme here, conkers are at £10 a Kilogram on eBay so it’s probably more cost effective to pick up conkers vs pinecones. They are still free to find but probably less available than the aforementioned pinecones. However, these little horse chestnuts can be more pleasing to the eye with their shiny reddish-brown shells. They can be used to create a conker wreath without even needing to do any intricate designs, and it actually looks good! If you want to paint them then they could also make interesting little baubles, with a few glued together to make a cluster. It’s also worth mentioning, although not proven, some people swear by the horse chestnut’s natural ability to repel spiders and moths. So this could be a perfect alternative for any arachnophobes out there.