I have always admired lavender wands. They are so pretty with their beautifully woven ribbons. Having an abundance of lavender in the garden, I decided to make lavender wands myself.

Having never tried this before, I looked up the basic instructions and started my task. First, with scissors in hand, I marched out to the lavender plants and trimmed 10 long stems. This was my first mistake. (I’ll get to why later.) I set myself down at my table and laid out the lavender, gathered them and tied them together just under the blooms. Next, I took a spoon and pressed on the stems just below the ribbon. This step is important so that when turning the cage of the wand the stems don’t break. I carefully bent the stems down around the lavender to form a cage. I started weaving the ribbon. It wasn’t going so well. My unders and overs were starting to duplicate themselves, the pattern was broken. Had I gone under instead of over? What was going on here?

Remember when I said my first mistake was trimming 10 long stems? Well, what my instructions failed to tell me (when it said to trim 7-15 stems) was that the number trimmed had to be an odd number. This, I finally figured out on my own. So, I plucked out one of the stems and started over. This time, the pattern worked just fine.

As with most diy projects, the first one is usually a learning process. Now I know what I would do differently next time. I would cut an odd number of stems and I would leave a longer tail on my first knot to tie the bow with. Not bad for a first attempt. Live and learn..

As always, Happy Crafting!