Craft Projects, Quick and Easy Crafts, Wreath

Another floral arrangement

I got into another floral project the other night that was inspired by the arrangement I made last week and the boring TV show that was on right next to it.

Flowers by tv

Brian was watching Pardon The Interruption, which I actually enjoy during football season but find less interesting in the offseason (Sorry Tony and Mike!). So instead of watching TV, I started admiring my new arrangement. And then I noticed my other arrangement that I’d thrown together a while back on the other side of the room with additional flowers just waiting to be added. What better time than during PTI!?

My vase already consisted of these flowers…

Flowers3

… and these flowers…. err, branches….
Flowers2

… and the flowers on the right. But I wanted to add in the flowers on the left and a few more colorful sprigs of pink and purple flowers (kinda pictured below, and kinda pictured above).

Flowers1

The vase I wanted to use was a clearance score at Michaels. I paid less than $3 for this teal vase.

Vase

The vase is short and the mouth is narrow, but since the base is wide all of the flowers tend to lean to one side.

Much like the other arrangement, I started by cutting the ends of the wire off to shorten each stem. I did random lengths to not everything was the same height. To do so, I cut them with wire cutters/strippers. (Apparently, this might not be the appropriate tool to use since the top circles are used to strip the protective coating off of wire. But the bottom 3/4 inches are used for cutting wires, which the flowers are made of, so I stand by my choice! Plus, it was wayyyy easier than using traditional wire cutters. Ladies, if your hubby looks at you like you are crazy for using wire cutters, just ignore him :p)

Tools

Once all of the flowers were trimmed and re-trimmed, I started to assemble everything back in the vase. I ended up leaving out the accent branches — they have more of a fall color scheme to them anyway, so maybe I’ll be making seasonal arrangements later this year!

Unlike the other arrangement, I didn’t want to add filler to the vase, so the flowers had to stand on their own. When I had an arrangement that I liked, I gathered it up out of the vase and wrapped thread around the base where the lip of the vase would cover. This secured everything together, making the flowers stand tall instead of leaning to one side or the other.

Then, I filled in the opening of the vase with a few short, pink sprigs that weren’t tall enough for the arrangement. They add just a little more color and oomph to the arrangement.

Finished Floral Arrangement

As you can tell, I really like wispy arrangements.

This guy lives on the other side of the room on a game cabinet. It creates nice movement in the room because your eye is drawn from one arrangement to the other. I am thinking about moving the purple arrangement closer to our bar — the vase is filled with corks after all — and creating one more for the television cabinet. We’ll see.

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset

Even though I love to garden outside, I am not very good at keeping things alive inside. These fake flowers are a great way to bring the feeling of the outdoors inside without having to remember to water them!

Craft Projects

Paper flower arrangement

I went to Hobby Lobby to buy one knob and left with my knob and a ton of fake flowers. Hobby Lobby has the best flowers. I especially love their paper flowers, which don’t look real, but also don’t look like they are supposed to be real.

The best part about the flowers was the price! Each sprig was 80¢ on clearance.

Hobby Lobby Flowers

I scooped up all of the clearance flowers to make an arrangement for our family room. I wanted to use the vase that we used as our unity candle for our wedding. It’s been sitting in our guest room with the half-burned floating candle collecting dust. Instead of filling the vase with the glass marbles that often accompany floral arrangements, I decided to use corks. We got married at a winery, so it made sense to use corks with the vase for that reason. Plus, I have so many corks! So, corks were both creative and cost effective!

I tried out my plan before cutting any of the flowers down.

Flowers too tall in vase

Once I decided that I liked the cork and the flowers in the vase, I cut down the stems to fit.

Flowers cut

Then, I started to put everything together in the vase. This was easier said than done because the corks didn’t really want to fall nicely in line. First I tried stacking them so everything was in a vertical line. Five tries later… I gave up on this method.

Corks in vase

I opted to stick the flowers in first, then just toss all of the corks in and let them naturally fall into place. It seemed like the only other method to try, so I just did it over and over again under they fell a way that I liked.

Flowers close up

Here’s what I came up with:

Floral Arrangement

This picture took forever to take because someone kept getting in the way….

Rem and flowers

This was after he stole a cork and ran away with it, forcing me to chase him under our kitchen table. The joys of having a mischievous dog. Thanks, Rem.

Anyway… I love how this turned out and that it is secretly sentimental. If you look close you can see the inscription from our wedding. You can also see little specs of the green stem.

Corks

For now, the arrangement is living next to our television. I want to jazz up this space a little bit so it is less black.

Flowers by tv

We’ll see if it drives Brian nuts having a few sprigs in front of the TV.

Flowers

If you see any clearance sprigs at your local HL, pick ’em up! They add such a nice pop of color and a fresh look to a room.

Christmas, Craft Projects, Holiday, Quick and Easy Crafts, Wine Crafts

Wine cork grape ornaments

I think this craft is one of my all-time favorites. My neighbor and I did a craft night before my Trash to treasure fair and we made so many cool things out of corks!

Unfortunately, I only have photos of the finished project. It’s hard to remember to take photos when you are crafting with one of your best friends. It’s basically non-stop talking mixed with singing along to Christmas music.

Anyway, check these out!IMG_0020

To make a wine cork grape ornament, you will need 8 wine-stained corks, a thin piece of cork, wire, hot glue, ribbon and a leaf!

First, you will need to cut the tops of your corks off. We used sharp knives from my kitchen to cut through the cork. Err, correction, Allie used the sharp knives… I couldn’t stand the noise it made. Either way, cut about half an inch from the wine stained end. We didn’t care if ours we all the same length because the different sizes gave the ornament a nice depth to it. (Can an ornament have depth?)

IMG_0021

Once the cork tops were sliced off, I arranged them on a flat piece of cork that Allie got from TJ Maxx. It’s super thin and was meant to be a placemat. It worked great for this project, but you could use really anything to glue the corks onto. Cardboard, maybe.

Once the corks were arranged in a grape shape, we traced around them and cut out the cork. Then, we glued the leaf at the top (from a fake flower) and proceeded to glue each grape onto the cork.

IMG_0022

When the glue dried, I poked wire through the cork and made a hidden loop behind the leaf. Then I strung my ribbon through the top and hung it on our holiday garland!

I absolutely love these ornaments and will definitely be gifting a few this holiday season.