Centerpiece Progress

My original vision for centerpieces was a mixture of topiaries on half of the tables and cylinder vases with floating candles on the other half. I thought the topiaries would add height to the room, and I've always liked the look of them. I originally planned to have them look something like this:

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However, when my mom and I went looking for relatively inexpensive silk flowers that would work we couldn't find anything that would be reasonably priced (when covering a 6" foam ball) for around 18 centerpieces. I had seen Miss Beagle's post on Weddingbee about tulle pomanders and my mom had seen a similar idea somewhere, so we decided to try it for the centerpieces.

Since it was Sunday, Hobby Lobby was closed, and Michaels only had the overpriced bridal tulle. But, we thought maybe the tulle circles would be easier than plain tulle anyway, so we went ahead and bought a couple packages. (It ends up that it looks the same whether you cut the pieces of tulle yourself or use pre-cut circles, so don't waste your money!) I already had some pearl head pins from the unity candle project so we bought 1 more package thinking the pearls would be pretty with the tulle. (You can't see the pearl heads, so don't waste your money on that either. Hey, you live and you learn, right? We ended up buying sewing pins - 750 of them for $4.) I had already bought the flower pots at Hobby Lobby because they were 50% off, making the 6" flowerpots $1.00. This was by far the cheapest we could find them, so I went ahead and bought all 18 of them.

My mom started by painting all of the pots black. We just used craft paint and a brush. We both figured it would take at least a couple bottles of paint, but my mom ended up finishing them and still had some paint left over! And they only took one coat! I love how they turned out:

While my mom was doing that, I started with the tulle. I made the tulle circle into a cone shape and pinned the 'point' of the cone to the ball and then fluffed out the edges. (So mine has a different look than Miss Beagle's pomanders.) It wasn't hard at all, but we quickly realized it would take more tulle than we thought. I got about 1/3 of the way done with the two packages of tulle circles (which were different sizes).

The next day we went to Hobby Lobby and bought 3 yards of their regular tulle for about $1/yd. I was originally going to cut circles out of it, but after finding out how long that would take, I ended up just cutting pieces and realized it looked exactly the same. When I was about halfway done, it looked like this:

*Another note: Use a white styrofoam ball rather than a green one!*

My mom is brilliant and happened to put the ball on top of the flower pot to see what it looked like that way. Well, I ended up loving it. And I love it even more because it will save me both time and money. By doing it this way I won't have to buy dowel rods, plaster to fill the pots with, or rocks/something to cover up the plaster. I'll also use a lot less tulle since I'll only be covering half of a 6" ball AND I can cut the balls in half which will also save money! I ordered the styrofoam balls from plasteelcorp.com and for 9 6" balls (which I'll cut in half) and 6 3" balls that I'm using for something else (post coming soon!) it was only $36 including shipping. I'm going to either wait for the tulle to go on sale or else use a 50% off coupon at Hobby Lobby next time as well. Ok, enough with the details, let me know what you think:

We'll be adding a pink ribbon around the middle of the pot and a cardstock square with our monogram or names and wedding date. I haven't designed them yet, though. What do you think? My mom thinks we should add some pearls or something, but I'm not sure yet how to do that or what to use exactly. Let me know if you have any suggestions! I'd love to hear them!

Did your centerpieces end up totally different than what you originally imagined?