Hydrangea Balls

Hi All!

Its been a while.

I know.

Stop giving me a hard time!

Yes, I've been a little slack when it comes to Booger & Pokie but I do at least have a good reason.  I've been helping my friend, Shannon, with her wedding!  Which brings me to the subject for today's post.  This will be the first in a series of wedding related posts.  I had so much fun with all these wedding activities.

I was so blessed to have my mom plan every detail of my wedding.  I know some brides like to be more hands on but, at that point in my life, I was so happy to just pick out my dress and show up where I was told.  So with all this planning being so new to me, I thought others might like to know what we did, what worked, and what didn't work.

So the first lesson I learned was to plan ahead, way ahead.  As the wedding gets closer, you realize you will only have so much time to get things set up at the wedding location.  Anything you can get done ahead of time, no matter how small, do it!  Shannon knew she wanted hydrangea balls to go on the wood arbor during the ceremony.  I am not usually a fan of silk flowers because they always look so fake to me.  But if we were to use real hydrangeas, they would have had to be made to close to the wedding. And I knew there would be so many other things to do.  So the silk flowers were the best option.




a finished hydrangea ball on a glass candlestick (a great way to reuse them for the reception)

Here's what I used:
6 6" Styrofoam balls
14 Ashland Hydrangea stems from Michael ( I used 4 blue, 5 green and 5 white)
4 packages of Long Pearlized Pins
1 1/2" grosgrain ribbon
2 packages of twist pins

I had a picture in mind of the exact color hydrangeas I wanted for these balls.  Of course, I always get an idea stuck in my mind.  I tend to fixate on it, really build it up in my head and spend lots of time thinking about how beautiful it will be.  Then, I spend hours looking for that exact thing with no luck!  Because nothing ever matches the crazy I can create in my head!

Anyway, I  couldn't find exactly the right colors of hydrangeas so I got several different shades of blues to get the effect I wanted.  I pulled all the flowers off the head of the stem and separated them into piles.  I usually put 2-3 different color petals together with blue behind the lighter colors most of the time.  I attached each group to the Styrofoam ball with one long pearlized pin and continued this way around the whole ball until it was covered.

To attach the ribbon...I first thought we would drill a hole through the balls, thread the ribbon through, and tie it at the bottom.  This would work but I wanted to give the bride the option to sell these after the wedding if she wanted to.  I decided to attach the ribbon with twist pins instead.  This way, if another bride wants to use these but would rather have a different color ribbon, it wouldn't be too difficult to replace. 





Here they are hanging behind the beautiful bride and handsome groom in the courtyard of the Hotel Indigo in Athens, GA.