Make Your Own: Desktop Floral Pens

A few weeks ago Baby Girl's school celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week.  

We love, love, love Baby Girl's teacher and decided to make her a wreath (post coming soon).  We also wanted to show appreciation for Baby Girl's awesome principal and the office ladies, so we made up a few floral pen arrangements.

Check out how easy these are to pull together:

Flowers

I looked through my summer supply bins and chose three different colorful daisies for these arrangements.  I wanted each 'bouquet' to pop with bold color.  I also pulled a few small leaves out to create some foliage.

Note:  You can see that I have removed the floral blooms from their stems, I'll be replacing those with toothpicks in a bit.

Pots & Pens

Left:  After searching through my collection of containers, I decided on these pre-filled (with Styrofoam) wooden pots.  I liked these better than plastic because their weight will keep them from tipping over.

 The pots came already painted white, but with sort of an antique-y well worn look.  I wanted them to be bright and clean looking so I freshened them up with a coat of white paint.  I also darkened the Styrofoam to look like potting soil. 

Right:  Pens!  A package of pens was the only thing I had to actually leave the house for - there are perks to running your own business, supplies abound!  Maybe one day I'll take you on a tour of my supply stash......

Prep the Pens

I used a pair of wire cutters to remove the paper clip extension from the pen caps, prepping three pens for each arrangement.

Glue in Place

After running a bead of hot glue along each pen cap, I gently pushed them into the Styrofoam.  The glue will keep the caps from falling back out of the 'soil'.

I recommend inserting the caps at a slight angle so that when the pens are in place, they sort of radiate out from the center.  This will give your flowers more room once the arrangements are complete.

Making Flowers

After applying a small dot of hot glue, I attached a toothpick into the underside of each flower head.  This creates a nice, small but firm, 'stem' to tape to the pen.

Once the toothpicks had cooled into place, I taped them to the pens with green floral tape.  Make sure to keep wrapping the tape all the way down, covering most of the pen.  This gives the arrangement a more natural look.

Tip:  Remember that when working with floral tape, you must gently stretch as you go.  Stretching the tape activates the adhesive properties and keeps the tape in place.  However, I always add a tiny bit of hot glue where I leave off.  I don't want my tape to end up unraveling ;)

Pens in Place

Things are starting to come together here, and look pretty great!  But, there needs to be just a little bit of foliage to fill things out.

Greens

Remember those tiny little leave from the earlier photo?  Once I got the flowers in place, the tiny leaves seemed...too tiny!  

Back into the supply bins I went until I found these similarly colored linear leaves.  

A combination of the two types will be perfect!

Greens

I glued two long leaves at the back of each arrangement and tucked one of the smaller leaves down in front.  Each of the leaves came already wired, so they were easy to gently bend into a realistic looking position.

The arrangements look so much better now, foliage helps everything ;)

Ready to Write

The pens can stay positioned in the container as a cute, desktop arrangement, or be easily pulled out to use.

Gift Wrap

Once the arrangements were complete, we slipped them into gift bags that Baby Girl decorated.

And it's that easy to create your own floral pens.  I think I might need a few for my own desk ;)

**********

I hope you enjoyed this how-to post, thanks for stopping by!

-Jennifer

© Jennifer Adams Flowers 2016