A Pair of Pears

A few weeks ago, when posting about my living room redo here, I got many questions about these pears...

Commenters were very flattering when they asked me how I had made them, when in fact I purchased them for an outrageous 5 dollars each (Yikes!). So, I set out to recreate what seemed to be a hit in my living room. Here is the result...

Much of this process will require some ad libbing on your part, but here is the general idea of what I did to create my living room pears.

1)Collected my materials: Purchased long, cheap grass reeds at a local craft store (a whopping $1.59 for more than 20!), used styrofoam balls I already had, picked a dead branch of my small magnolia tree, and gathered my hot glue gun and sticks.

2)Hot glued the branch into a hole on my styrofoam ball.

3)Wrapped and glued some pillow stuffing onto the ball and stick, trying to create an ideal shape or outline. (This is probably somewhat unecessary, but it made me feel as though I was wrapping around something?)

4) Hot glued the reeds, which I split in hald to make thinner, onthe the styrofoam ball and began wrapping them up and around the stick like crazy.

5) Continued wrapping and gluing reeds until we acheived full coverage.

And VOILA! We had a pear. The tricky part was getting the pear to stand up. The ones I purchased clearly had some built in weighting system. In the end I manuvered the reeds on the bottom to creat a flat, even surface on which they could stand.

I am very happy with the final product, even if it isn't quite as neat and tight at the original ones I purchased. And I am even happier to have found their current resting place, my new living room bookshelf!

Be honest and let me know what you think! You certainly have the option of painting them to acheive the nice green color the purchased ones had. I opted out because I like the mixture of that natural look! Good luck, and don't forget to link to our flickr account if you try them out yourself. I am sure someone will out do my feeble attempts soon enough!

I'll be linking to these parties this week, Happy Thursday!