Thursday, March 28, 2013

Making A Pomander-Without Floral Foam

As some of you know, Local Color Flowers made a New Year’s resolution to give up floral foam this year. Last week, we had a new floral foam free design challenge-flower girl pomanders.

A floral pomander, or kissing ball is a basically a ball of flowers that is carried on a ribbon “strap” like a purse. Normally, we would use a little floral foam ball, soaked in water, filled with flowers with a ribbon attached.

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The end result would look something like this.

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To tackle this design challenge, I first posted a note on the Flower Farmers facebook group. This is a relatively new group made up of flower farmers, designers and enthusiasts. My post elicited lots of suggestions and comments which was super helpful. I was surprised and how many people had tried inventive, creative ways to make pomanders.

I took the ideas to the studio with me and posed the challenge to Carling and Irene. Our idea was basic-find something round that we could poke flowers into or glue flowers to.

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This hodge podge group of materials represents some of the items we tried: an apple, a tulip bulb, a ball of boxwood rigged together and a wired ball of moss.

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After a couple attempts, we settled on a little ball of crumpled up soft, aluminum wire stuffed with moss. we then used oasis floral glue to glue the ranunculus on to the moss.

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The end result looked great!

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For improvements, I think we would try to just use a ball of moss or something that could be totally composted.  Overall though, I think we were excited about the results.

If anyone else has made pomanders without using floral foam, I’d love to hear about your experience and any suggestions you have for floral foam free projects.

2 comments:

  1. Love the scale of the tiny pommander that you created - looks like a great technique for getting just the scale/size you want for those toddler/teeney flower girls.

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  2. Great idea. My mom used to make wreath with soaked moss that was wrapped with a tape and then she would poke the stems in. I loved the smell of the soaking moss as it reminded me of x-mas.

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