DIY Palm Leaf Broom – A Pretty Happy Home

Prepare to have your mind blown.

There are palm trees in Ireland.

No, not the big, tropical island-type palm trees, but definitely another variety.

It’s called the cabbage palm and it is originally from New Zealand.

I have two in my backyard (or garden as they call it here). Here’s one of them.

The cabbage palm drops its leaves all. the. time. We pick them up weekly.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I lay in bed thinking of things I want to do around our home. It helps me fall asleep…unless I come up with a really good idea. Then it’s all “who wants to start a project at 3 a.m.?” Not even the crickets are interested in that.

During one of these sessions last week – and I have no explanation for it – I was thinking about those palm trees. Sometimes when we are on our walk/scooter ride to school, my son will find a dried palm leaf on the ground and he will pick it up and use it as a sword. People love to see us coming.

I hope my son understands that riding a scooter with a real sword would be a bad idea, but he doesn’t have a real sword, so I’m not going to sweat it. For now.

Somehow in all of that late night musing, I realized if those palm leaves were strong enough for a sword, they could be strong enough for a broom. And I could really use a broom by my front door right now. Broom. Wreath. You say potato. I say this could really work!

I gathered up all of the dried palm leaves that I could find on the ground plus a few random sticks. A broom needs a handle, after all, and I wasn’t sure which one would work best.

I trimmed the top curly part off all of the palm leaves in order to make the leaves a similar length.

I used my good kitchen scissors. I might regret that later.

Then I decided which branch I wanted to use for the handle and tried to figure out how to attach the leaves to the branch.

Simply securing them with twine did not work. I couldn’t get the twine tight enough.

I tried using packing tape, but that only secured the outer layer of leaves and the inner layers slipped out.

That meant we were going with the MVP of most craft projects, hot glue.

One by one, I glued the leaves onto the branch. I selected ones that fit together, but other than that, there wasn’t a strong method to my madness.

This took 10 minutes – tops. I love a good, quick project!

Here’s how it looked with all of the leaves glued to the stick.

After that, I wrapped some twine around the leaves to make it look more broom-ish.

It’s important, at this point, to know which is the front of your broom. You’ll want to secure the twine on the side that won’t be seen. My first piece of twine got a little twisted around since my branch has a bend in it, but I adjusted the remaining pieces.

Then I did a fist pump while sitting in the foyer of my empty house because I was loving this project! There might have even been a victory chant.

I really do get that excited about these things.

I know I land on something good when Handy Husband actually notices the new project and comments positively.

Remember when he didn’t notice this weird thin g with the book pumpkin?

Later, my kids decided they would start sweeping the floor with the broom. The one time when they actually want to help me clean and I was like, “NO! I have to take pictures first!” It survived their manhandling though.

Again, hot glue for the win.

By the way, those orange pumpkins are the largest ones I found at the small grocery store in our village.

Carving those should be interesting!

This project still makes me immensely happy! I love that I was able to create something unique to our home out of leaves and a branch I found in our yard. Yard debris, in essence, that was headed for the compost pile. My only regret is I didn’t think of it earlier!