HOW TO - Pomanders

As I've talked about before, we decided that pomanders would be our best option to add some color to the mainly white/grey/tan outdoor courtyard where we are having our ceremony.  It was a hard decision on what we would use to make the pomanders (fabric, tissue, silk flowers) and the final decision came down to fabric and tissue.  We decided that on a hot and humid summer day in Indiana, the tissue wouldn't hold up as well, so fabric it is!

I originally found these here and fell in love with them.  They suggest paper lanterns as your base, but I used Smoothfoam (which is an alternative to styrofoam) that I found on the Plasteel Corp website and it worked great!!

So we found some Kona Cotton fabric that we liked and bought half a yard as an experiment.  We originally cut them in to 2.5" circles (diameter) and followed the directions on the website.  It took pretty much the entire half yard to cover one of the 3" ball that we are using.  Here's my version of the DIY...

1. Fold the circle in half and put a dot of hot glue in the center of the half circle

2. Fold the circle in half again so that you make your own little flowers that look like this

3. Begin covering your base

4. Cover the entire ball with fabric and then add a ribbon (if you'd like) by tying it to some floral wire, putting a dot of hot glue on the tip of the wire and pushing it in the ball

You'll notice on this (my first attempt) that you can see some white spots, so here are some SPECIAL tips that will hopefully make the process easier for you...

1. Spray paint the ball (and let it dry) before you start to cover it.  That way, if you have some bald spots, they won't show up like this...
2. Don't put the first dot of hot glue too close to the straight edge of the half circle... putting the glue more in the middle makes it MUCH easier to attach the petal to the ball
3. Don't worry about exact sizes.  If you want your pomanders larger, use a larger base.  If you do this, you can also use larger fabric circles.  We ended up using 3" circles in the end, instead of 2.5"
4. INVEST!!!  We purchased a rotary cutter, a cutting board and a circle stencil because we can cut circles about 10x faster than the scissors that we started out with!  Here's a picture of my new favorite toy...

I really hope this "how to" is useful... they are so cute and I think once you get rolling on them, they will be fairly quick to make... the first one took me about an hour, but I'm sure that after I do a few more, I'll have that cut easily in half!  Let me know what you think!!!