Hydrangea Topiary

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With summer in full swing in Minnesota, we've been enjoying fresh flowers a lot.  And I LOVE fresh flowers right from the garden.  But sadly they don't last forever.  Before I know it, it's time to replace my little lovelies with a new arrangement.  And even though artificial flowers last forever, they just can't measure up to the real ones....most of the time.

I keep seeing great projects out here in blogland where people make fake flowers look SO real, and so beautiful.  I wanted to get in on the action....so I thought I would give fake flowers a try this week.

I had found this ugly vase/urn thing at the thrift store last week. 

Eeeeeew!  The green and gold were just NOT working for me.  But what a cute little shape, right?  (I'm just kicking myself that I didn't buy the two other matching urns that were there.  Oh well.).  Step one was to spray paint that vase a more flattering color.

I just needed something to put in my new thrift store find.  While I was at Joanne's I saw that they had all their spring flowers on sale for 70% off.  It didn't matter to me that they were spring flowers - they're still flowers, aren't they!?!?

So I bought five hydrangea stems.

Pretty, right?  I didn't care that they were spring colors - I loved the pink and peach in the middle of the flowers.

I also found a floral  styrofoam ball lying around that I never used for another craft (which just happened to fit perfectly into my new urn - yay!).

I took my hydrangea stems and cut them apart.  I cut each individual flower off of main stem.  You'll want it so that there's about an inch to half inch of stem left off the flower base.

Just like so.  Then I took a pencil and poked a hole into the styrofoam ball (a really professional technique, I know).  

Take one of the hydrangea flowers and poke it into the hole.  You want the stem to go through part of the styrofoam, but you don't want to bend the stem.  I tried poking it in on it's own first and I ended up bending the wire stem and ruining the flower.  So then I tried the pencil method - it worked really well.  Just be careful not put a hole that is TOO big in the styrofoam, otherwise the flower will fall out.

There, one done!  Only like a million more flowers to go.  Now continue pushing flower stems into the styrofoam ball until it is covered with flowers, or your thumb feels like it's going to fall off -- whichever comes first.  My holes ended up being about 1/2 inch apart, depending on the size of the flower I put in.  I tried to make sure I had small and big flowers next to each other to give a varied, more natural look.

I used almost all of the five stems going around the topiary ball.  But I was SO incredibly thrilled with how my fake flowers turned out.  It actually turned out better than I had expected.  Here's what the hydrangea covered sphere looks like:

Do you love it??  Then I placed the topiary ball into my spray-painted urn:

Perfect!  Now I can enjoy "spring" flowers all year long!!

Here's the materials and cost breakdown for this project:

Floral or Styrofoam Ball:  Had on hand

Flower Stems (I used hydrangeas):  $1.05 each x 5 = 5.25

Urn, vase or pot:  $2.99

Spray Paint:  Had on hand

Scissors

Pencil

TOTAL:  $8.24

Not bad, right?  And don't worry, the thumb pain from pushing the flowers in isn't really all that bad - you'll forget all about it when you see your beauteous flower topiary. :)

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