First things first - have you picked my hairstyle? If not, go do that now. If yes, you may continue reading. I'm hosting another shower at our house this weekend which means I'm crafting up some decorations this week. Not too many things though, because I'm going with more of a "pretty" theme and less of a "crafty" one. The bud vase I'm about to show you is one I found online last week. I can't remember where so I'm not sourcing it, but if anyone else knows where it came from, feel free to ~~yell at me for stealing someone else's idea~~ let me know and I'll link to it.

To make one of these cute bud vases you need two things: a balloon...

...and a candle votive.

These two things should be about the same size. Skip the water balloons and those long skinny ones you use to make weiner dog hats. You just need a regular ol' balloon and a regular small candle votive.

Here's my helpful hint for you: go ahead and blow up the balloon before you start and then let all the air out. This helps get the balloon all stretchy-outy. Then, cut off the tip of the balloon - you know, the rolled up part that you put in your mouth when you blow it up.

Then just stick the votive inside the balloon! (Ha, I wrote that like it's the easiest thing ever. It's not. It's hard to get the tight balloon all the way up the votive. It hurts your fingers and takes forever. And then your hands smell all rubbery and you want to cry.) (Do like me: ask your husband to do it for you.)

Make sure you pull the balloon all the way up around the votive so that it looks like this:

Then just poke that little top part down and bam! You've got yourself a bud vase.

I snipped a couple pansies from my yard to use as a demo. They obviously aren't the best flowers to use. Try to picture it with a cute daisy.

Yea, that color scheme's not really doing it for me. But here's another view anyway.

I've made about ten of these, but I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with them yet. I think they'd be cute lined up in a row somewhere. If I had a window above my kitchen sink I'd definitely put some there. Maybe I'll place one or two on each of the bathroom sinks to cheer them up a little.

If you are a mom or grandma that receives a lot of picked dandelions and weeds from your kiddos, this would be the perfect way to display them for a day or two. And, since balloons come in all sorts of colors, you can make one to match your decor or switch them out for the seasons. Hooray for cute, easy projects!