Moss Balls and Topiaries (Size Does Matter!)

With Blizzard Jonas' visit last weekend, I've had enough of winter. I guess the idea of our deck being colder than our fridge doesn't sit well with me. It makes me feel like a vegetable put on ice to keep crunchy until served! But since winter wants to stick around, it seems I am left with two options:
- Behave like a caveman and yell at winter to leave.
- Act normal and ignore it. If winter still wants to get cozy, then simply imply that it is no longer wanted by changing the home decor to Spring.
I chose the later and started flirting with Spring. I haven't done much yet, but I've done enough to remind me of beautiful warm Spring weather: moss balls and topiaries.

They may look like a lot of work, but they were quite easy to make. So no, I didn't need the skills of Edward Scissorhands to make these beauties :)
My first project was a cork & moss ball, or the "World War II Sea Mine" as Greg calls it. I used some natural color Spanish Moss, wine corks, a hot glue gun and a Wiffle Ball. Any plastic or Styrofoam ball would suffice to make this one, but I prefer a Wiffle Ball, because not only did I already have one on hand, but also its circular holes make the cork placement easier.





I used green Spanish moss for the one I made last year, which you might have seen in Greg's "Filling the Void" post. Not to have two WWII Sea Mines exactly the same, I decided to use natural color Spanish Moss with this second one.





The pine cone & moss ball have the same principle with the WWII Sea Mines. I started by hot gluing pine cones to the openings of the Wiffle Ball.





Once all the openings were covered with pine cones, I hot glued reindeer moss to the areas between the pine cones until all the white surface was covered.





After tackling the small ones, I decided to go bigger. I bought an 8 inch Styrofoam ball and two 12 inch half Styrofoam ball forms from Amazon - one 12 inch single ball is pricier than 2 half ones (aff link ).Other than the size of the balls, the process was almost the same.
Now here is something interesting I learned while making these bigger moss balls -moss ball topiaries- Apparently any moss ball bigger than 6-7 inches gains a much more sophisticated title in stores -Moss Ball Topiary- and is more expensive. So regardless of functionality - which is home decor in this case - size does matter! Anyway... back to the subject.





After the acrylic paint dried, I started hot gluing the green Spanish moss, section-by-section, and that was that.
Here is the finished 8 inch moss topiary.





With the bigger moss ball topiary (I can't help myself giggling at the name), it was pretty much the same process. The only difference was that I decided to add some vines on top of it so it would resemble the real deal. To accomplish this, I randomly wrapped some vines on the top part then hot glued the vines' ends at the bottom of the ball. Then I covered those unsightly ends with more green Spanish moss.











Since I made it this far with the moss topiaries, I thought I should try to make something different than just a ball shape. That is when I came up with this little guy.





For this one I used metal strap. The ones I had at home were perforated, but it didn't matter since they were going to be covered with sheet moss. I cut 3 pieces of metal strap of the same length and first created the circles then merged them into sphere shapes.





Please visit our blog post for the full tutorial on moss balls & topiaries seen in this post.
If you are interested in similar crafts & DiY projects, click here to see more crafts & DiY projects from The Navage Patch.
Thanks for reading!
Handan, xo






Original article and pictures take http://www.hometalk.com/13530463/moss-balls-and-topiaries-size-does-matter site