Preserve Cattails for Autumn Decor
If you never sprayed wild cattails with your mother's AquaNet™ when you were a child, let us be the first fill you in on this fun floral craft and share an updated method for preserving them. The longer link to our project video is here.
We used cattails to make a bouquet for our fireplace in a Colonial log cabin room. The link to the longer video is above.
Also called bulrushes or reedmace, these tall catkins look great with fresh or dried flowers. You can find them in boggy locations in late summer.Be sure to wear cute boots because the surrounding areas can be muddy or wet. Don't forget your pruning shears!
Look at some of the fanciful shapes you can find in cattails. We've found all of these except one!
a. Dove Ice Cream Bar
b. hotDog
c. tawny white
d. still green
e. double
f. pencil (haven't found this one yet, and it's our favorite!)
The center photo is a classic, velvety brown, tubular cattail.
Unless you're collecting seeds, an exploded cattail is not the type to bring home or have in your car! The seeds blow everywhere. But cattails that survive storms, wind, and rain will probably make it home with you without exploding!
Once we get the cattails home we push the stems into floral foam. We brace the foam on two sides with bricks because the cattails are very top heavy and will fall over easily.
We brush the cattails gently to remove any stray fluff.
We spray our cattails with ModPodge Clear Acrylic Sealer. You can still buy and use AquaNet™, but some types of hairspray may be too wet and cause cattails to explode, or may add unwanted sheen.
Ready for arranging, The ModPodge sealer dries quickly. We like to arrange the cattails in a tall container like a florist's bucket which is weighted on the bottom. Remember, cattails can tip over easily.
You can put cattails in water with fresh flowers, or with dried plant material and no water.
You may need to shorten the stems for your arrangement, but they cut very easily.
Big bunches of flowers or dried plants help hold the cattails in place. We used hydrangea, Alstroemeria, and Russian Sage.
We hid a painting of a ginger cat behind the bouquet in the depths of the fireplace.
The cattails and florist's bucket add nice height for the center of this fireplace arrangement.
In the foreground is the horse sculpture we made from a toy painted with chalk and metallic paint — our very first HomeTalk post! You can see more photos of this project and find a link to the horse sculpture project here.
Late summer in the perfect time to hunt for cattails, but they often survive intact through early winter too! Let us know in the comments if you've ever made bouquets with them (or used your mom's 
hairspray to keep them perfect!)
Resources for this project:
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Yes, I thought I was the only one that did this. We grew up in Florida on the gulf and my mom always had these around our house sprayed with aqua net. I recently added them to my home decor myself sprayed with aqua net. Haha but I will be putting modge podge on the next set I get.
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