Weddingbee Blog

If you knew my flower girl, an adorable yet rambunctious 4 year old, you would know that no ball of flowers stood a chance of surviving the wedding day.  I would give an hour, max, to even the best made pomander. That made the high price tag of floral pomanders even harder to swallow. So I started doing research, and after reading tons of tutorials (none of which I bothered to bookmark or save of course… bad blogger), I figured I could easily take this one on.

Off I went to Michaels to pick up some supplies. This actually took multiple trips because I am cheap, and since Michaels is actually on my way home from work, I am not above picking supplies up, one per day, to fully take advantage of 40% and 50% off coupons. Silk flowers are expensive, people! Here are the supplies I used:

• Small Styrofoam ball (I went with 4”, but I would have gone larger if I had an older girl carrying the ball)
• 5 stems of silk hydrangea flowers (I was picking by color and I needed deep red, so my only option was a pretty small stem. They had much fuller stems that were cheaper too, but only in blues and purples. I actually bought 6 and ended up returning one)
• Glue gun and glue refills (Some people suggest using a low heat setting gun. Mine is old with only one setting, and worked fine.)
• Ribbon (I used 1 ½” double faced satin ribbon. It was left over from a previous project= FREE)
• Very big screwdriver, and very small screwdriver (Borrowed from Mr. C’s tool chest)

I knew I wanted the ribbon to hang out of the other end of the ball, rather than it just being attached somewhere. I like the look, and again am thinking of making it as strong as possible. I used the super big screwdriver and just jammed it through the Styrofoam ball to make a hole through it, and then pushed the ribbon through. The ribbon was doubled (to make a loop) so a simple knot at the bottom keeps it in place.

Next, I got the flowers ready by cutting each little bloom off the stem. Be careful not to cut too close, as you need enough of a stem to push into the ball.

At first I started by using the actual flower to make the hole in the Styrofoam, but for extra support I would take them out and put a bit of hot glue into the hole before putting the flower back in for good. Those little flowers were being difficult going in and out though, so I started using a very small screwdriver (about the same width of the stem) to make the hole first. I also found that I could do three at a time this way and it went much faster.

I continued on filling them in very closely and became a little obsessed with having no white Styrofoam showing through. As I said, my normal temperature glue gun didn’t cause any major problems (other than when I used too much glue and pushed the flower in, and it burned the crap out of my little fingers… ouch!), but I would recommend to be careful about keeping the tip from actually touching the Styrofoam. It not only melted the foam a bit, but didn’t smell so great, either.

I must say, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. I’ve even flipped and thrown it around a bit and nothing has budged or even begun to fall off. Not only that, but after the coupons I used, all of the purchased supplies only came out to about sixteen bucks! Sixteen instead of eighty is my kind of savings!

Did you take any projects on you originally thought you would purchase, and save a chunk of change?