Ombré flower hearts

There’s something about ombré flower decorations that I can’t resist – it’s like you’re taking something from nature and then painting with it to make a form of art. Only I cheat, and use fake flowers. 🙂

I managed to find some ranunculus bunches on sale at Michaels that were perfect for this project since a) the flowers are compact and quite even but b) there was some color variation within the bunch so that the arrangement would look more natural and allow for a more gradual ombré color fade.

The first job is to de-head the flowers.

Then you can roughly arrange them on top of the metal heart in ascending (or is it descending???) color order with the lightest at the top and the darkest at the bottom. Then you can assess whether or not you need to make a second Michaels trip in the same day to go get another two bunches like I did… 🙂

The actual process of gluing the heads onto the chicken wire base is pretty easy, although a little intensive on the hot glue gunning since it’s hard to line up the glue on the flower with the thin metal wire, so you kind of have to slather it on all over the back of the flower head hoping that 10% of it might actually land on some wire and stick there. As you start filling in the shape with flowers, it actually helps to have the flower petals stick to the neighboring flower to help keep them in place.

I tried to arrange the flowers in such a way that alternated the size of the flowers as evenly as possible, as well as graduating the color in a, er, graduated way rather than having stripes of different colors. Once the whole shape was filled in, I noticed a few gaps where I could nestle in an additional small flower head and did this until the whole heart was looking really full and lush.

The final step was to flip the heart over to give some additional hot glue gun from below, where I would put a big dollop of glue between each flower stalk and the nearest bit of metal wire for additional security.

Here is the final product:

I actually ended up making two of these to use as centerpieces for my daughters’s birthday cake table (which was “How To Train Your Dragon” themed – more to come on that!).