Rose and Cement Ornamental Balls

The Zaitleys
by The Zaitleys
4 Materials
$30
1 Hour
Medium

Last December I made rose petal jam as holiday gifts. It was my first time making jam, buying rose petals in bulk, maybe I’ve mentioned I am not great at math? That combination meant that we ended up with a GIANT extra bag of edible dried rose petals. To use up some of them we decided to make some ornamental balls for table decoration.

These are very versatile too. We made some with potpourri and some with rose petals. You could also use beautiful dried autumn leaves or dried lavender to name a few.

What you will need for this project:


-      Plastic hollow ornaments (do not use glass!!)

-      Cement (fine grains - not the one with rocks in it) - For more cement inspiration check out our blog. Those bags are big and you'll have lots of left overs!

-      A container and something to mix with

-      Dried flower petals, herbs, or potpourri

-      Exacto knife

-      Piece of paper or funnel

The first, and most annoying part of this project is getting the petals into the balls. For the potpourri we stuffed them in piece by piece. Breaking them up as needed. For the rose petals we made funnels out of printer paper to help guide them into the opening of the ornament. We used a chop stick to jam them in through the funnel – it’s not a dainty process, you’ll really need to jam those petals in there.

We filled the ornaments up as much as possible for a few reasons:


1.    The more they take up space, the less space the cement will take up, making the balls less heavy

2.    Depending on how you pour your cement in, the angles, and how you leave it to dry, if there’s not enough petals to stand out, you will just be left with a ball of cement- it would be beautiful if you smashed it…..but that’s a different project


Once full, we mixed up the cement in a recycled coffee cup. These are great for small projects like this as you can throw them away after. Who likes cleaning?! And you can pinch them at the lip to create a spout.


 We mixed the cement a bit runnier then we would have for a table or anything that would need to be sturdy. It was more important to be able to get the cement into the dime sized hole then it will be to gain optimal cement strength. These balls will not be doing any heavy lifting.

We then filled the ornaments till they were around ¾ full and moved the cement around to catch as many of the petals as it would.

Because the cement was runnier then normal, it took longer to cure. We left them for a full 24 hours before we took the next steps

Once fully dried you can peel off the plastic casing. We made many cuts with the exacto knife and peeled it away. I found the more cuts the better as it gave more give to the pieces I was trying to remove.

Each ball will look different depending on the petals and the amount and drying angle of the ornament.

From here you can play around with them. Some of our balls had pieces of cement we didn’t like running though the petals so we removed it. Some didn’t have enough petals so we glued some more on the areas that were lacking.


This will make a beautiful centrepiece for your autumn and thanksgiving meals.


pop over to www.talldorkandmatching.com to check out some other options for decorating your rose ornamental balls

Resources for this project:
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The Zaitleys
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