Apple Vases

Hi, friends!  Hope you all had a great weekend.  I did even if it did feel a little short.  But really, don't they all? My mom hosted a bridal shower at her house yesterday afternoon and she roped me into doing the centerpieces for it.  Considering she practically cooked all the food for the last shower I hosted, I figured I probably owed her.  I think I even got off a little easy with just having to do centerpieces.

So, you've seen how I turned apples into candle holders here, and how I covered a votive with a balloon to make a bud vase like this, and now I'm going to show you how I combined the two ideas.  I took the apple-as-a-base thought and combined it with the lots-of-small-flower-arrangements thought, and ended up with apple vases.  Need a visual?

If you attended my wedding (or even if you've just seen pictures), you know that green apples are my favorite.  The bride that this shower was for is using black, white, and green as her wedding colors but the color scheme for this shower was pink and green.  So it was perfect for me to use more green apples.

You'll have to excuse the quality of these pictures because they were all taken with my phone.  Once again, I forgot to bring my camera with me.

I ordered this handy-dandy tool about a year or so ago.  It's the Tea Light Fruit Candle Carver Tool.  How's that for a name?  When I ordered mine, they were sold out on every US website that I could find so I had to order it from somewhere in Canada.  Didn't really expect it to get held up in customs but it did.  It took months for it to come in.

The tool twists into a piece of fruit like this:

And then carves out a perfectly sized hole.

Usually I'd just pop a tea light into that hole and call it a done deal, but I was going for a different look this time.  Instead of popping in a tea light, I popped in a piece of oasis.

I had a limited amount of flowers so I just wanted to use 2 or 3 per apple.  I clipped the stems short.

Now, I could've just stuck the flowers in the oasis and called it a day, and that is what I did at first.  Turns out, though, that you could see the oasis and part of the holed-out apple through the flowers, and I didn't like that.  To solve that problem, I stuck a small ball of green moss on top of the oasis.  This is when things started getting messy.

With the moss on top, then it was just a matter of poking in the flowers.  I didn't attach the moss at all, I just held it on there and let the flower stems go through it and hold it in place.

Kinda cute, right?

But obviously one apple with four measly flowers does not a centerpiece make.  The real magic was in arranging them! (Oh geez, what a corny line.)  I originally thought I'd just line them up in a row on the table, but then we decided it needed a little height.  Definitely something a couple of upside down wine glasses could solve.

I loved it!

Here's a straight-on view.

We placed some on the corner of the kitchen bar too.

What do you think?  Like 'em?  One of the women at the party asked for a centerpiece idea for an engagement party that she was doing around the 4th of July.  I just suggested doing the same thing but with red apples and white flowers.  Not only would it be cute, but it'd stick with the patriotic color scheme but without being stars and stripes.

I should've brought all the leftover apple flower arrangements to work with me for a little happy on each of my coworkers' desks, but I didn't think of that until now.  Oh well.

Doc just called from his plane - he's leaving me for Philadelphia tonight.  I'm home alone, the laundry has been folded and put away, my clothes for tomorrow have been picked out and ironed, my workout (mini as it may be) has been done, and this post has been written.  Since it's Monday night, there's only one thing left to do: settle in on the couch and get ready for The Bachelorette!

(Judge me if you want, it's my guilty pleasure.)