No longer just for Christmas, now wreaths are for every season

For Mary Closner, any time is the right time to hang a decorative wreath.

She’s created them for Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter and Pride. She’s made one-of-a-kind pieces to celebrate not just holidays, but hobbies and special events ― from wreaths made of golf balls and Pez dispensers to playing cards. She even did a dog wreath with printed fabric photos of a client’s dogs and hung with dog tags for all their pets, past and present.

Even when she’s making a wreath for a traditional holiday, Closner always tries to add a clever touch. For a family that celebrated both winter holidays, she created a wreath that was half Christmas, half Hanukkah. Sometimes she opts out of the traditional ring shape, creating square wreaths, or, for a retired dairy farmer, a wreath with a massive papier-mâché cow’s head bursting through the center.

Closner works out of a tiny downtown Northfield studio that’s packed “tight as a tick” with stacked boxes of artificial flowers, wax fruit, plastic dinosaurs, trolls, fake snow and plastic, glass and vintage ornaments. There’s an entire boxful of painted silver seashells. Another of 250 gold dinosaurs waiting for their debut.

“Ornaments are not just round balls and solid colors,” she said. “I can even custom glitter or paint glass ornaments to produce a client’s favorite color combinations.”

This eclectic inventory comes from Closner searching eBay, Etsy, garage sales, antique stores and Christmas clearance sales.

Sometimes, her work starts with a few existing elements, and she fills in from there.

“I’ve had a number of commissions from people who give me a few of their most treasured Christmas ornaments or toys from childhood and ask me to create a wreath around them,” she said. “In those cases, I always look for a theme or a unifying element, and then I find lots of other items to add to the mix. I like to tuck a little sentimental treasure in each art wreath if I can.”

While the wreaths can be small, she’s also done some sizable custom pieces, including a wall-mounted installation in St. Paul’s Grahns Upholstery, made with heavy, fabric-covered ornaments of remnants from all their recent furniture projects. Right now, she’s working with a box of old eyeglasses from an optometrist who went out of business. Her original wreaths start at around $350.

Her go-to tools include several high-temp cordless glue guns (“Going cordless changed my life,” she said) to affix small items to the pool noodles, Styrofoam, wire, wood and tinsel garland-wrapped backers she uses as wreath bases. There’s always a bowl of ice water nearby to soothe singed fingers, which she says happens often.

Joy Svoboda, a retired marketing professional from Montgomery, Minn., owns four of Closner’s wreaths and hopes to commission at least one more. “The first one I bought was all-white, with an owl in the middle,” she said. “I also have the large rectangular Valentine’s Day wreath with the arrows shooting out of it. It’s heavy to hang, but it’s so beautiful.”

Svoboda is a fan of the art and the artist alike, citing Closner’s charisma and personality.

“She’s a multidimensional person,” Svoboda said of Closner, “a tactile artist, a writer, an appreciator of beauty and someone who collects not just things, but lots of different kinds of people as her friends. It’s remarkable that she can use all those skills to express herself so well.”

Closner started wreath-making as a side hustle, back when her main gig was owning swag: fine and funky art, a Northfield shop that specialized in what she described as “one-of-a-kind art and stuff you don’t need, but have to have.” Closner closed the store in 2019 to have more time to care for her mother, Maxine, who was her favorite — and lone — employee (unpaid). Since her mother died at 97 last year, Closner has been devoting more time to wreath-making and art collecting.

“No matter what I do in life, I always need to have a creative side gig,” she said.

Closner freely reveals that she never had the privilege of taking art classes growing up. But she doesn’t see that as all bad.

“I’m not sure I’d be doing what I’m doing if I’d taken a lot of classes,” she said. “I’m a terrible painter, I’m bad at ceramics, I can hardly draw a straight line, but I love it all.”

Yet she extols the joy of being a joyful and enthusiastic amateur. “Making art refreshes me, and I think if you get pleasure out of doing something, you should keep doing it and get over that perfectionism thing,” she said. “We often act like you can only do one thing in life. But I think it’s a lot of fun to try as many creative things as you can.”