My boyfriend would be the first to say I’m not crafty. Although I have some things I’ve done (read:finished), he has yet to see me finish a project in the almost 2 years we have been together. I decided for V-day, I would be crafty to show him that I can do crafts. I wanted something traditional, but something that reflects who he is. He isn’t big on saving knick-knacks or that type of thing, so I hit up pinterest for ideas. I came up with two inspirations.
The first: A cute basket of candy… Which he loves, but hates because he would eat it all.
The link for this one does not take you to this picture and I could not find this anywhere on the site.
The second: An alcohol bouquet… the problem here is he doesn’t drink hard liquor, he prefers wine.
So with these two ideas, I decided to make a basket with mini wine bottles but dress them up as flowers to give it some character. The problem was figuring out how to make them. I decided on felt for the flowers, skewers for the stems, and a cute little basket with a Styrofoam ball. I was so sure it was going to work. I picked up 3 4-packs of mini wine bottles. Target didn’t have Styrofoam balls or felt. I saw crepe paper and grabbed red and pink deciding I could figure it out later. The foam balls could wait; I wanted to make the flowers right away.
I finally realized when I got home that wine bottles are bigger than the liquor bottles and there would probably be no way short of duct tape to get them on the skewers. If I did manage that, it would be a problem of getting them to stay in the foam. I threw that idea out the window and decided on just baskets.
Good luck trying to find out how to make wine bottle crepe paper flowers. I found a few blogs with information on how to make flowers, but none were really clear or correct (Martha Stewart seems to think tissue paper is crepe paper, maybe it’s a regional thing) and most used a tight “stem” of crepe paper to start. I was on my own.
I decided to go with a length I figured was way too long (48”) so I could cut off whatever was too much and figure out how long it should be. Thank goodness I went for a long length. I decided to do whatever looked good to me. Twist it halfway in over and over, twist it half way out, glue here, put some more glue. Did I mention 8 of the bottles were plastic and I was using a hi-temp hot glue gun? Thankfully, on those, I was aware enough to only use glue on the cap. The only casualty was my thumb which ended up in gauze, tape, and a latex glove so I could keep on working without worrying about burning it any more.
A few hours later (it really didn’t take that long, but I was kicked out of the kitchen since the tax man was coming) and this is what we have: (I left the pictures large so you can edit them down as you please)
The start of the rose on the plastic bottle:
The complete rose:
Top view of my dozen roses
Side view of the roses.
Completed roses, in a basket, fancied up with tissue paper as a filler (also, it is our onion/bread basket, so it looks kind of icky on the inside)
So, I took your advice and made the pins my own. The red paper was easier to work with than the pink which may be why the red ones look better. As far as I am concerned, this is a pin-win! (My thumb may not agree). Hopefully he thinks so as well.
This is cute!
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