We don’t have a huge budget but we want to make our wedding day something special. One way of doing that is to add your own touch, by making the accessories and decorations that you need. Handcrafting these items imbues them with special meaning while saving precious dollars. I have a list of tasks and object ts that I want to personally create, first up is pomanders made with silk flowers.
Unfortunately this isn’t a budget friendly project. Pomanders are made with fresh or silk flowers and even small ones require a LOT of flowers. I have seen tissue paper versions as well that would work great for a modern or casual theme. I may make some of those in the future, but I don’t think they would hold up for the 9 months until our wedding. Using silk flowers allows me to make these well in advance of the actual day. I plan to hang them in a spare closet wrapped in plastic to keep them clean until September.
What You Need Per Pomander:
4” Styrofoam Ball
Ribbon
Hot Glue Gun and Glue
Approx 30 Silk Roses (2.5” across)
Wire Snips
Step by Step:
1) Snip off all of the rose heads from the greenery, leaving a 1 ½” stem to stick in the styrofoam. My flowers had wire stems so wire snips were needed to cut them off.
2) Use a cheap, wide ribbon to wrap once around the Styrofoam ball. This will help support the pomander when it is hanging. 
Before tying it at the top, slip the pretty ribbon you want to use to hang your pomander underneath it. I then tied my pretty ribbon to the supporting ribbon. Use hot glue to seal the knots. Don’t worry about the ugly knots, they will be hidden by flowers at the end.
3) Starting at the bottom, take one flower head and put a bead of hot glue on the stem. Stick the stem into the Styrofoam ball. Continue to place the flowers into the ball. I found it looked best using concentric circles starting outward from the first flower. I would also test each flower before using glue to hold it in, some flowers simply looked ugly next to each other. 
Continue until you’ve completely covered the Styrofoam, you may need fewer or more flowers depending on how tightly you pack them. It’s best to have a few extra flowers on hand to fill in any empty spots, this is one project where you don’t want to run out early! You can simply hang your finished pomander or add a ribbon or bow to the top. I made little swashes out of the same ribbon for mine, I thought it looked less fussy than a bow. 
A few thoughts
You can use smaller or larger Styrofoam balls, but keep in mind the flowers will make the finished pomander much larger than the ball you use. A 3” ball will produce a 6” diameter pomander. Here is a 4" ball with one of the finished pomanders.
The number of flowers you need for each increases dramatically the larger the ball you use. The material costs make this project expensive, so search around for the best deal on both balls and flowers. I bought my Styrofoam at one shop, where they cost $1.00 a piece. I went to another shop for flowers, where I bought stems with a dozen rose heads each. The stems were $4 a piece or $40 for a dozen. In quantity, this puts the per flower cost at about 30 cents a piece. One pomander requires approximately $10 just in materials. My plans call for over a dozen pomanders to be used between the ceremony and reception! Ours will all hang in the background so using inexpensive flowers is OK, no one will see them up close. You may want to use better quality flowers if your pomanders will be front and center. Fortunately, the pomanders should be in perfect shape after our wedding and hopefully I will be able to sell them to recoup some of the cost. PS - Sorry for the terrible photos, I am not a photographer at all!
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7 comments:
Those look super pretty!!!
I'm nosy -- what is your wedding budget? You do not have to answer. :)
Good luck with the planning -- September will be such a beatufiul month!
I love them, they look great!!
What a great way to make something very nice and save money doing so.
John DeFlumeri Jr
So beautiful! You mentioned pomander before and I wondered what it was. (And I was too lazy to look it up.) BTW, I love your color scheme!
Very beautiful and classy! How many will you need?
Those are so gorgeous!
It could be frugal. How much would they cost in the store? I wouldn't even know where to buy such things.
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