My very sweet husband brought home two Mums from Trader Joe’s last week, so while we marathon watched Breaking Bad today (I decided to get on the bandwagon before my Nana asked if I’d been living under a rock), I broke out the glue gun and fancied up some Ikea planters. My inspiration was this awesome Instagram photo, courtesy of the blog, Frou Frou and Frills:
I loved the planter, but wasn’t having an easy time finding something similar. Grant and I headed to Ikea on Saturday while Jason finished pulling carpet out of the guest room, where I had seen 9.5″ Mandel plant pots for $12.99. As far as front porch stuff goes, I always think bigger is better, whether we’re talking lights, plants, or mailboxes, and that was the largest size they sold.
On a completely unrelated note, Grant got a new haircut this week. Somehow Jason convinced me that it would be better to let him cut Grant’s hair than have him scream in the chair at the barber shop for twenty minutes. Well, it kept getting shorter and shorter as he tried to fix the uneven stuff, until he finally had two completely bald spots and I said “enough”. At one point my pregnancy hormones took over and I burst into tears and shouted, “You ruined him!”
That will be our first and last home haircut.
The only supplies I needed for this project were sisal rope and a glue gun. The process was basically the same as making our rope wrapped lamp, except that I started from the top of the planter. I only wanted a couple inches of rope, so I wrapped it around moving downwards, squeezing my bead of glue against the base of the layer of rope above it. That allowed each row of rope to stick together, so that there weren’t spaces between the layers.
This is a close up of our finished product:
I had purchased some long sticks while I was at Ikea because my inspiration photo had bare branches mixed in with the flowers, but I decided to nix them in the end, they just weren’t working out.
The last step was adding potting soil and planting my mums. I am not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination, but I love the look of fresh flowers by the front door (for however long I manage to keep them alive, their days are numbered):
That’s Jason and Captain No-Naps in their Sunday best. They’re working on hardwood flooring and getting ready for the Raven’s game today.
