tying the knot in phx: they're fluffity! they're puffity! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!

yes, i used to watch homestar runner in college with my friends. no shame in that. but this post is not about marshmallows... it's about pomanders! yes, giant balls of fluffity tissue paper flowers! and yes, i ignorantly volunteered myself for this project. (warning! picture-heavy post!)

the infamous tissue paper pomanders from amanda of vintageglam! - btw, she's AWESOME, and totally gave me some tips on her process and ordering tp...

like pretty much every bride out there, i quickly, madly, deeply fell head over heels for this project. i know there have been many tutorials on how to make these, so, i'll keep mine to a minimum. i basically followed ms. martha's instructions on folding the paper flowers. but before we delve into that world, let's have some fun with some inspiration pictures, shall we?

this lovely fluff ball is hand-dyed coffee filters!!!!! so gorgeous. via alice from paintedwhite.com.

i actually contacted alice for some advice/tips on dying my own coffee filters. after burning through a pretty hefty stack of my dad's costco pack of filters, i learned that i do not have the immense skill of arranging coffee filters nicely, nor did i desire to dye anymore. so i gave up on this attempt. (message me if you want to learn, bc i'd be more than happy to share!)

i googled "aisle pomanders", and this lovely picture came up... i think these are probably real flowers, which i can't even begin to IMAGINE how much those would cost... i wanted to see what aisle pomanders would look like in an alternating pattern....

here
hanging pomanders! if we were having our ceremony outside, you can bet your bottom dollar that i would have made a million of these teeny poms (but out of tp) to hang. alas, we are having our ceremony in a church... so i resigned myself to hanging a few tiny ones from our aforementioned manzie trees.

uhm, are those moss poms to die for, or what?!? sighhhhhhhh. i was inspired by this, but decided to not attempt this, as i have NO idea what i'd do with a giant moss ball. but it's still sexy to look at. **SIGH**

so everyone has seen the flowergirl pomanders, right? so yeah... the fiance and i looooove the look of pomanders, so we wanted our two sweet little flowergirls to carry them. i'd LOVE to be able to do real flowers but again, i'm totally not qualified for that, and secondly, the cheapest quote i received from a florist was about $55/ball. We're talking carnations and a 4" ball. uhhhh. EXACTLY! my cousin who recently got married sprung for a real rosebud pomander for her fg (who is also one of mine!), and while it was lovely, the petals were already browning by the time the ceremony took place.... so that kind of confirmed my crafting plan....

yup! i made them out of fake flowers. I made one with pink peonies and hydrangeas, and the other with white hydrangeas. because flowers are fluffity, you should shoot for a smaller styrofoam ball (i learned the hard way). I used 4" balls with 22-24g wire for the flowergirl poms, and about 6-8 peonies, and about 3 3/4 stems of hydrangeas. floral clearance at joann's and michael's are my best friends.

notice the "joy" on my face. this was about 35+ minutes and 4 glue gun burns from the first pom...

the smaller pom: i cut the buds off, but kept the stems. I tried to cut them off in bunches, as long as they were roughly the same height. i then wired the bunches together, to get a dense cluster.

you can kind of see the wiring here.... I would put a giant blob of hot glue in the spot that i wanted (generally underneath another cluster) and then shove the wire through the glue and press the stems into the glue to be secured.

for the peony pom (sorry, i forgot to take pictures), I basically pulled the blooms off of the stems, poked a hole in the foam with the stem part that was still attached to the petal portion, filled the hole with hot glue, and then stuck the flower back into the hot glue. you have to hold it for a couple of seconds because they're pretty heavy and can fall out if the glue hasn't dried yet. i filled in the gaps between the peonies with some pink hydrangeas. if you are using large blooms, i'd recommend planning out where the flowers will go prior to gluing them down as we had a few re-do's in order to keep the pom from looking oddly sparse on one side.

the finished products! as you can see, the white one came out smaller, even though the balls are the same size; this is because the peony blooms are HUUUGE! oh! another tip - it's always smarter to attach the ribbon handle through the ball BEFORE you attach the flowers. but i had forgotten to buy the ribbon, so i ended up doing it later. (Mr. Ramen was actually hard at work on our STD and website design at this point. i love that guy!)

now for the tissue paper poms, i started on this project by myself, with the aid of my lovely sister, and one of the girls from my church's youth group. after the coffee filter fiasco (see failure story above), i decided to go with the tissue paper route. i was hesitant to order tissue paper online, because i knew i wanted a particular color. and i also didn't know how much to order. so i used my mom's giant stack of el cheap-o white tissue paper and decided to use my tea+red food coloring dye to get the perfect pink. yes, i hand-dyed this tp. anyways, long story short, it took a long time, and i don't recommend anyone doing it this way, but luckily i live in the nation's dryest state, so that probably helped speed up the process.

the result: a giant mass of perfect barely blush pink paper. after this, i decided to just bite the bullet, and ordered birch tissue paper from nashville wraps. on a foray into the SF flower market with my cousin, i discovered this little floral supply warehouse, where they sold styrofoam balls for SUPER cheap. i actually ended up having my cousin buy 16 of the 6" balls and 2 of the 4" ones initially, and she brought it down to SoCal for me. after i learned that a 6" ball = 10" pomander, i sold my 14 unused balls and had my sister purchase 4" balls on her next trip to SF. because the price per ball decreases with a bulk purchase, she ended up getting me 20, for about $20 or so. i love flower markets.

so the plan was to make a pom to hang from every other pew at the church. there are about 15 rows. so... roughly 16 pomanders. faced with this ridonculous challenge, i did what any sane bride-to-be would do: i recruited all of my girlfriends, and had a folding/fluffing party!

hard at work.... seriously, i could not ask for better friends! one of my dear friends actually brought her new husband and brother-in-law to help out!

the results: 6 mini poms, plus 2 almost filled large shopping bags of fluffies! lest you think this was enough flowers, i probably filled up those bags at least 2 more times.... i can fold and fluff in my sleep. we probably spent 5 days straight doing this - but we spread it out over several weeks, so we (my mom, sister, fiance, and myself) were constantly cutting wire and paper, folding, and fluffing while we got caught up on almost the entire last season of heroes, lost, and chuck.

close up: don't worry, i put Mr. Ramen to work! he's such a trooper. aren't the pink poms sooo cute?

this is to show you how densely i packed my poms - and not TOO dense, mostly because we got lazy and didn't want to make any more flowers, and also because they looked pretty good loose. i also didn't use and hot glue because we figured no one was going to be swinging the poms (although we tested that), and the wire was reallllly secure. i suggest using about 4"/flower of thicker gauge wire (~ 22g) for these larger poms. we used probably a 24-26g for the baby poms and just cut the wire (and paper) down proportionally.