Totally Lauren Amber: Decorative Balls

I have a tall glass canister with a lid that I would like to have on display. I usually use it for candy when I host parties with candy bars/candy buffets. It has been sitting in various places in the house because I didn't know what to put inside of it. I found some decorative balls on sale and brought them home but they ended up being too big. I returned them and have been on the hunt to find smaller ones for the past few weeks. No luck...I can't find smaller ones, they are not my colors, they are too expensive, etc. etc...

I decided I would make my own. I wasn't sure what I was going to use but I headed to Hobby Lobby. I found a variety of sizes of styrofoam balls and itsy-beads-sies (a vase filler). They looked easy enough to hot glue to a styrofoam ball. Boy was I wrong about that. They had so much static electricity that they were EVERYWHERE. I finished a few balls with those things and moved on to something much easier...BEANS!

Begin by hot gluing an area on the ball and then placing the beans on top of the ball.

Keep doing this until you have the entire ball covered.

I put all of the finished balls into a bag and headed outside to paint them. See how I have more with beans then the other little balls...

I stuck each ball on a food skewer to make it easy to spray paint them.

The first color I used was black. I had two balls painted and thought they looked great until I painted the third one. It was one with the little ball thingies all over it. The paint went on great but as soon as I took my finger off of the sprayer I could hear a strange sound coming from the ball as if it was hissing at me.

The spray paint was melting the little ball thingies that I had glued all over the styrofoam ball.

I painted the rest of the balls anyway.

Here they are drying.

In the end they turned out like this. I am happy with the results even if the paint did destroy the little balls. It just gives it a different kind of look.

After I put them in the tall glass canister that I had planned to put them in I decided that something else would go better in that canister so I searched for a new place for these decorative balls to go. Here they are in there new home...a cute little tray I found on sale at Marshalls for $7.99.