Lavender Wand Tutorial

I had a lovely afternoon making some lavender wands with my friend, Jan. We put together a tutorial for you.

First, gather some lavender. It's lost it's colour here, but is still fragrant. We put the stems in water to see if it would help soften the tips where we bend them. I'm not sure that it worked.

 We chose 11 stems. I prefer a fatter wand, like the one at the end of the tutorial. It's up to you. You do need to have an odd number to keep the weaving working.

 Tie the stems just below the base of the flowers.

 Start to bend the stems down over the blossom. Be gentle. The stems can crack.

 Continue...

 Start to space them out and arrange with weaving ribbon in mind.

 Tie the base of it.

 It helps if you have an extra set of hands.

 Start to weave by putting the ribbon of choice Under the stems. (we couldn't find the thin ribbon, so used this instead. It's not very colourful, but whadda gonna do. You can see the colourful version at the end.)

 Start to weave around the wand. We used a wool needle to in and out. It helped a lot.

 I got kind of involved in my own wand and forgot to take more pictures of the progress. Here is the finished wand. Her weaving is much neater than mine. I messed up and tried to compensate several times. :}

 Here is the colourful, bigger version. Make sure you pull the weaving as tight as you can, as the wand shrinks a little as it dries out.

There you have it.  A little momento of summer days. Thanks Jan.

Have a good one,

Amanda