How to Make a Valentine's Day Kissing Ball

For this project you will need just a few items.

1. A round floral ball for silk flowers. If you want to make a kissing ball with real flowers you will need a wet floral ball and soak it overnight in water before using.
2. Pipe cleaners
3. Hot glue gun and glue sticks
4. Floral stem roses (small roses work the best)
5. Decorative ribbon
6. Chops sticks or bamboo skewers
7. Drinking Straw

Most kissing balls are made to hang on something or to be worn around the wrist at a wedding from a ribbon.

However, there is a secret to attaching the ribbon that will keep it from pulling out of the foam ball from the weight of the flowers or just from an active flower girl twirling it around.

It starts with the chop stick or the bamboo skewer.

First, insert the chop stick or skewer through the center of the foam ball.

Next, you pull out the chop stick or skewer, insert it in the middle of the drinking straw and slide the whole thing back through the hole in the middle of the foam ball that you just created.

Basically the chop stick or skewer creates the first pass through the foam ball so that you can then use it again to pass the drinking straw through the middle of the foam ball.

Then you pull the chop stick or skewer out, leave the drinking straw in place and cut off the ends of the drinking straw.

This creates a tunnel through the foam ball for the pipe cleaners to easily slide through.

Most pipe cleaners will not be long enough to use just one so you will need to twist the ends of two of them together to make for a longer length of pipe cleaners.

Insert the joined pipe cleaners through the opening created by the drinking straw. Pull the two exposed ends of the pipe cleaners around the sides of the foam ball and twist them together on top.

Now you can easily slide the decorative ribbon underneath the pipe cleaners to use as a hanger or to wrap around your wrist.

To keep the ribbon from sliding up and down the length of the pipe cleaners, just add a dab of hot glue to keep it in place on the foam ball.

This method keeps the ribbon from pulling out of the foam ball since the weight of the flowers is balanced through the center of the ball.

And the drinking straw keeps the wire in the pipe cleaners from cutting through the foam ball and slicing it in two from the weight as well.

The only thing left to do then is to cut up the floral stems you want to use and push the ends of the flowers in to the foam ball.

You can also add the leaves from the rose stems and little pieces of cut ribbon to fill in the gaps where the foam ball may show through the flower buds.