Elder Life Engagement: Fun with Fabric Topiaries at Treemont

Fabric Topiaries have been very popular projects for my classes and can be made for any season, theme or holiday you desire. This week one of my classes created unique Valentines Day Topiaries. These are fun, quick projects to complete, but they do take a good amount of prep time cutting small squares of fabric- lots and lots of them! And students often need help with the fine details and final construction.

The supplies needed to complete a small fabric topiary are:

Fabric Squares- cut in about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inch squares (depending on the size of your Styrofoam ball)
Styrofoam ball
Wooden Skewer
Wooden Dowel
Clay Pot
Floral Foam
Shredded Paper or Excelsior
Acrylic Paints
Foam Brushes
Foam plates to be used as paint palette
Embellishments- ribbon, glitter, silk leaves and flowers etc.
Hot glue gun and lots of hot glue

Instructions:

Take fabric squares, place right side against the styrofoam ball and punch in with small skewer using the blunt side of the skewer. If you are going to use different types of fabric for your design, then alternate between fabrics to create design.
Place the next piece of fabric as close as you can to your first piece and punch it in- then repeat, and repeat and repeat. A small styrofoam ball will take about 1/3 of a yard of fabric and approximately 30-45 minutes to complete.
Paint Pot and dowel with acrylic paint. Apply glitter while paint is wet if desired. Leave to dry.
Once the fabric ball is completely covered you can assemble your topiary. Poke your larger dowel into the fabric ball.
Make sure you cover the hole of the pot with a small piece of styrofoam plate and hot glue it to the bottom of the pot to make sure your dowel does not slip all the way through.
Put the florist foam in your pot, I usually do not have to hot glue the foam into the small pots, but for larger topiaries you do need to hot glue the foam into the pot, and should you decide to layer the balls, you may need to secure your dowel with plaster of paris.
Secure the dowel into the florist foam ( sometimes I run a bead of hot glue around the stick to secure).
To cover the florist foam I have used Excelsior, paper shreds and wood shreds depending on the theme.
To finish topiary, add ribbon, silk flowers or other decorations of your choice