How to Make a Candy Bouquet

This tutorial was originally posted on my first website, "When Pigs Fly". As I will be more focussed on crafts, food, and beverages on this site, I thought I'd re-publish the post as a teaser for the many NEW seasonal and themed candy bouquet tutorials coming up soon. Please enjoy the original post and "Follow Me" to make sure you don't miss my upcoming tutorials :-) (A Halloween themed basket will be posted soon!)

Original Post:

I've always wanted to try my hand at making a candy bouquet, but somehow my available time and a "candy bouquet" occasion never had a chance to meet. Until now! I enjoyed this project so much (it really didn't take a lot of time) that I am trying to come up with other "bouquet occassions" so I can do this project again. I'm thinking "theme" bouquets, maybe red, white, and blue with little American flags for Independence Day, all white and silver for a bridal shower, pastels for a baby shower, a Mexican fiesta theme, or a pirate theme, decorated with little gold chocolate coins and bandanas intermingled with the tissue. Too cute!

Here's the tutorial on how to make your own Candy Bouquet:

Assemble your supplies:

• Assorted wrapped candy bars, gum balls, hard candies, lollipops...
• Container for your arrangement (Mine was a plastic bowl and about 2" deep and 6" in diameter, but I'll bet a flower pot would work great for this!)
• Wooden skewers or dowels
• Silk flowers with leaves (Strip the flowers and leaves off the stems. Save the flowers for a future project.)
  Floral tape
• Floral foam
• Colored tissue paper
• Cool-temp glue gun
• Bow to decorate container

Directions:

Cut floral foam into chunks that fit your container. Floral foam is very light weight, so you will have to glue the chunks to the bottom of the container so they don't pull out due to the weight of the candy.

Poke skewers through the leaves you harvested from your silk flower stems. Make sure the leaves are pushed down far enough that you have enough "naked skewer" to run the length of your chosen candy bars. Wrap the bottom of your leaves and the skewer with floral tape to about 2.5 inches from the bottom. (Notes: Skewers should be cut to different lengths, tall ones go to the back of the arrangement, with lengths getting shorter and shorter as you come toward the front. For heavier candy, wrap 2 skewers together.)

For the taller stems at the back of your arrangement, fold tissue paper and poke the skewers through the paper as shown. This will help the tissue paper stand up to hide the backs of your "flowers" and the little fold at the bottom will cover your floral foam.

Begin creating your flowers by gluing your candy bars to your stems. Make sure the "naked" part of your skewer reaches the entire length of your candy, or the weight of the candy bar will cause them to droop or pull away from the skewer. (The picture above is how NOT to place the skewer!)

Here's a completed Reese's flower. I like the square shape in contrast to the longer, thinner rectangles of the other candy bars. I think York peppermint patties with their silver wrappers would also provide a nice contrast and a bit of sparkle :-)

For the "blooming" flowers, I glued the candy bars to a bit of cardboard for support. I then glued the cardboard to a stem.

Begin poking your stems into the floral foam. You'll see in the above picture that I have already cut some of my dowels and arranged my tissue to cover the foam. (Don't worry too much about placement at this time. Trust me, I poked and re-poked several times before I created my final bouquet. My foam probably looks like Swiss cheese!)

On a whim, I wired three Bit-O-Honey candies together to create a different flower. You'll see it in the picture below, as well as a bloom made of 4 pink and purple chewy candies with a gumball center. Cute!

Woo hoo! My bouquet is taking on a pretty good shape right now, but we still have a way to go. What shall we put in next?

Here's the stripped wire stem from my silk flowers. It was just laying on the counter looking lonely, so I decided I needed to incorporate into my bouquet. But how?

HA! I used floral tape to attach a gumball to each of the stems. I poked it right into the center of my bouquet and bent the wires to place these little balls of color randomly in my arrangement.

Aren't the colors pretty? The gumball stems added just what I needed to even out the bouquet. Genius, if I might say so myself!

We're almost finished. Looks pretty good, right? Keep poking your flowers into your foam until your arrangement is full of sweet goodness, and there are no bare spots. You might have to shorten some of your stems at this time to get the look you want.

We are done! Isn't the finished product fun? You'll see I've tucked in a few small pieces of tissue paper in between some of the blooms to cover any exposed foam. I also used glue dots to hold up some of the floppy folds of tissue at the back of the arrangement. Overall, this project cost under $10.00 and took about an hour to create. Best of all, I have a handmade-with-love birthday gift for a good friend. Happy birthday, Deanna!

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Want more candy fun? Click here to take a fun candy quiz from CandyAddict.com . It's harder than it looks. I only got 15 out of 26! How did you do?

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Hugs and blessings~

~~~Anne